In “Letter from Iran” Belén Fernández reminds us that we—people everywhere—are not Washington cyphers but flesh-and-blood human beings who must keep being defiant in order to retain that status.
Many celebrations of the great American musician Bob Dylan involve a personal journey through the archives of memory. Here, David Hayes recalls a thrilling series of concerts Dylan performed in 1981...and a late-night encounter. (This article was first published on 24 May 2011)
The most influential and original musician of the 1960s generation remains a figure of protean creativity half a century on. The wealth of attention still devoted to Bob Dylan is testament to a career of astonishing range. It also reflects the complex legacy of a formative decade which Dylan’s son
Kanafani can make you dream of a free Palestine in a multitude of ways. A Palestine freed through writing, through song, through poetry, through art, or through a rifle.
The Nobel literature award honours an eternal outsider whose critical distance from orthodoxy fuels her work's remarkable "predictive" quality, says Susan Watkins in this 2007 article.
The Nobel literature laureate is a seeker and educator in mysticism who uses Sufi ideas to enlarge her and her characters' humanity, says Müge Galin in this 2007 article.
Great works of literature are often love-letters to the form itself, but moral philosophy has rarely taken story-telling seriously. The work of Martha Nussbaum shows that the novel is key to social justice, through the role that reading plays in developing our moral imagination
The passionate, lyrical voice of the poet from Martinique was part of a lifework that embraces négritude, Marxism and surrealism all in one, says Nira Wickramasinghe. (This article was first published in openDemocracy on 21 April 2008)
A new Russian law banning US adoptions has been roundly criticised at home and abroad; a toddler’s unexplained death has been held up as justification. For Daniil Kotsyubinsky, it is all a case of history repeating: Russia’s past is full of tragic cases where children have become innocent victims.
