No facts, only versions

Guest edited by Colin Grant

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.

An act of faith

Colin Grant

"Jamaicans will tell you there are no facts, only versions. But our family stories recount versions of facts."

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."

'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."

Preface to The Stranger’s Quarters

Clementine E 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."

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.’"

Phil Okwedy

in conversation with 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."
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