March 19

Read an interview of Dunya Mikhail

Mikhail: As a woman, I wrote about the war’s impact on the home, the streets, on everyday life. When Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea was published in Iraq in 1995, the readers noticed that the tone was different. On readers’ level, the book was received well. On censors’ level, it was received with frowns [and contempt]. They interrogated me. I left my country right after its publication due to the complications I began to face.

Read about Valerio Zurlini here

Read about Zurlini's 1962 film Family Diary

Read about Zurlini's 1965 film The Camp Followers

Read an interview with John Burnside here

When my son was born, I went back to visit my aunt in Fife. When you have a child, you think about your personal history and what you offer them as a larger narrative and I realised I knew nothing about my father’s circumstances other than what he’d told me.

[Burnside knew his father had been adopted as a baby. What he learned from his aunt was that his father had been a foundling, left on a Fife doorstep in 1926.]

It made me think differently about him because he’d had to suffer things that, had he told me about them, I might have been more forgiving of his behaviour. I started writing this partly because I needed to work out how I felt about my father now that I knew his history.

Listen to John Burnside read some of his poems at The Poetry Archive

Visit the website of the Philip Roth Society