“Inside of me, a cemetery sleeps every night/ if you were to open up the front of me/you’d see graves of losses/ neatly arranged rectangles of rest/ but who’s to say the corpses stay/ exactly where I buried them?” The poet Preeti Vangani delivers her lines unflinchingly to a spellbound audience. A collective gasp is… Read more »
Epoch-defining events like the French Revolution or the American Civil War have always inspired literature. The Partition of India in 1947 is no exception. The Partition divided India into two nation states for Muslims and Hindus: the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India. It was described by Lord Mountbatten as ‘one of the… Read more »
The much-admired group of travel writers read extracts from their books, and the eclectic mix of styles itself demonstrated the fluidity of the genre of ‘travel writing’. The readings also demonstrated that travel writing is at heart about storytelling. Nicholas Shakespeare read from Bruce Chatwin, his biography on one of the most famous travel writers of all time, and… Read more »
