No facts, only versions
Memoirs are as much about what is excluded as what is included. This edition examines how you can evoke the truth in writing memoirs whilst drawing on memories that are sometimes fallible or contested.
Edited by: Colin Grant
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An act of faith
Colin Grant
"Jamaicans will tell you there are no facts, only versions. But our family stories recount versions of facts."
Colin Grant meditates on the ethical and moral dilemmas of agency and ownership when writing a memoir.
Searching for Nelsa Lowe
Hannah Lowe
"I recall my dad saying my aunt Nelsa had a bad thing for men or perhaps it was a thing for bad men."
Poet and memorist Hannah Lowe learns more about her aunt Nelsa, the owner of a famous restaurant in Kingston Jamaica in the 1960s.
‘I’ problems: some anxieties of autobiography
Nicholas Rankin
"Generally, in what I write, I prefer to hide. I'll duck behind a palisade of other people's quotes or into a thicket of erudition, not liking to reveal my core."
Nicholas Rankin, author of Trapped in History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me, tries to write honestly about his own life.
Preface to The Stranger’s Quarters
Clementine Ewokolo Burnley
"I’ve lived in places where you greet older folks with a handshake. Where people think you look like your parents. Somewhere you once belonged, before. A separate existence from this one, here, now."
Clementine E. Burnley introduces her memoir about her childhood in Victoria, Cameroon, the child of government workers.
Wilderness: In Search of Belonging
Sanjida O’Connell
"My stepfather quoted Virginia Woolf to me: ‘As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.’"
An extract from Dr Sanjida O’Connell's memoir about moving to the wilds of Somerset.
Phil Okwedy in conversation with Sanjida O’Connell
Phil Okwedy and Sanjida O’Connell
"Storytelling is cinema for the mind but unlike a film the story is only really present, only really alive, when there is a teller to tell an audience and imagine it."
Storyteller Phil Okwedy, the son of a Nigerian father and Welsh mother, is in conversation with Dr Sanjida O'Connell.