Essays

In this labile essay, Gareth Morgan plumbs the depths of the pool as a site of ritual, recreation, and the poet’s labour. From Mohenjo-daro to Carlton, Morgan recovers from the concrete history of public bathing a poetics of the ‘locus amoenus’.

What if we approached video games as we do poems? In this essay, Vidyan Ravinthiran proposes a new way of writing about gaming: a poetics that gives as much credence to the rhythms and repetition of fingerwork as to the patterns of storytelling.

Josefina Huq records the sibling intimacies fostered by the world-building of the Kirby video game franchise. Charting the vicissitudes of growing up and apart, the games serve as a reminder of all that she and her brother refuse to leave behind.

In this essay, Anwen Crawford reflects on being a latecomer to the sport that united her family: cricket. From scorebooks and dictionaries to journalism to on-field protest messages, Crawford tallies the many forms that cricket writing can take.

Read an edited extract from Abbas El-Zein’s memoir Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars out now. Published with permission from the author and Upswell Publishing.

In her final essay, literary scholar Sneja Gunew (1946–2024) explores the affective dimensions of migrant writers’ transit between languages, capping a lifetime’s advocacy for those whose participation in the national culture ‘is grounded in their differences’. We present a lightly edited version of this essay with reflections on Gunew’s life and work by Ivor Indyk and Eda Gunaydin.

Reading Palestine through South American literary and political history, Yumna Kassab reflects on the potency of symbols during times of repression.

Modern experiments in fiction writing have long convinced us that consciousness flows like a stream, but is it true of animals or AI? Ronnie Scott explores the range of narrative techniques used by writers from Lucy Ellmann to Octavia Butler to approach the ‘humanly inaccessible facts’ of consciousness.

Through a series of vignettes, author and bookseller Laura Woollett exposes the lack of transparency, as well as the tensions between building a business and supporting a community, in the publishing industry.

Melanie Walsh looks at how the data company BookScan hold the power to shape publishing companies, authors, and readers, and the emergence of “counterdata”.