Calibre Prize
Hold your nerve
I have not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth.
Accessibility Tools
When he steps outside and pulls off the mask, it feels like removing a second face, the one he keeps from the ones who wouldn't understand and those who would ...
On 15 August 2022, it will be seventy-five years since Jawaharlal Nehru declared that India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ had finally been ‘redeemed’. The rapturous crowds that gathered outside the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi on that sultry summer night cheered as loudspeakers relayed the words: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’
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In ABR's sixth 'Poem of the Week' Judith Beveridge discusses and reads her poem 'As Wasps Fly Upwards'
‘A king had a beautiful daughter,’ begins David Foster’s new book: 204 pages between grey boards, a reproduction of Filippo Lippi’s Madonna con Bambino e due angeli on the covers, the author’s name itself visible only on the acknowledgements page, in rather small writing.
I was only two bites into a corned beef and pickle sandwich and surrounded by unmarked exam papers when one of my students, Nod Clay, walked up and asked me to write him a reference.
‘You got a job interview Nod?’
‘No it’s for court, for assault.’
‘What sort of assault?’
‘With a brick.’
‘Jesus Nod…’
I pushed my chair away from the desk and folded my arms.