World Literature

  • Death as a career move

    Paul Doolan writes: Walter Benjamin took his own life at the age of 48. He wrote in his suicide note: ‘I am dying in a village where no one has ever heard of me.’ Had he survived and become an exile in New York, who knows? Perhaps the words ‘no one has ever heard of me’ would still ring true. Living might have proven to be a bad career move.

  • We need to write about diabetes

    Kieran Fionn Murphy writes: Depictions of type 2 diabetes remain virtually absent from English-language novels, even though 589 million people worldwide have the disease. A mere mention of a character with type 2 diabetes who isn’t feckless, gluttonous, evil or dissolute, even as an aside, could help a vast, marginalised population feel recognised.