This morning I got an intriguing email from Nicolette Bethel–writer, anthropologist, and blogger–announcing the launch of a new online poetry journal based in the Bahamas: Tongues of the Ocean (if I’m not mistaken, the title refers to the super-deep undersea trench off the coast of Andros). The journal is associated with the still-evolving Bahamas International [...]

The January 2009 issue of Tatler, the British society magazine, is not yet online, but the London Times has had a preview, and one particular article caught the eye of the paper’s arts editor: a report on a visit by V.S. Naipaul to a Ugandan “witch doctor” some months ago, written by–none other than–Lady Naipaul. [...]

I’ve come to recognise the special engine-hum of the DHL delivery van, and the driver must wonder why so many heavy boxes–for books are heavy–are suddenly being shipped to my house. It’s been more than a month since I last updated my Commonwealth Writers’ Prize “judge’s journal”, but it’s not because I’ve stopped reading. The [...]

As a writer, I write in the presence of all the languages of the world, even if I only know one. Humanities today are developing a practical, divining sense of languages, and are using a far higher proportion of the capacities of the human brain. Multilingualism should not be boiled down to the development of [...]

The Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy writes of the two voices in Kipling, which have been called the saxophone and the oboe. The first is the hard, militaristic, imperialist writer, and the second is the Kipling infused with Indianness, with admiration for the subcontinent’s cultures. Naipaul has a saxophone and an oboe, too, a hard [...]