Described by Nelson Mandela as a source of inspiration, Richard Turner was a central figure in the white South African student movement and key in its radicalization. Turner acquired his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was inspired by th...

Few of us have had the opportunity to visit Djibouti, the small crook of a country strategically located in the Horn of Africa, which makes "The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper" all the more seductive. In his first collection...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that whil...

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother Marie wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who sh...

In "The Pilgrim's Bowl", Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet meditates on the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and its power to evoke a complexity of emotions and astonishment. Jaccottet examines Morandi's ascetic still lifes, contrasting his artisti...

Praised by Paul Auster as "one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime", Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Pr...

One of India's foremost artists of the twentieth-century, Somnath Hore had a long and storied career that overlapped the boundaries between art and activism. "My Concept of Art" is a quasi-autobiographical essay that leads the reader through differen...

Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. In "Accounts and Drawings from Underground", Kentridge and Rosali...

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contempora...

Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. The films introduced a significant character in contemporary fict...