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Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh's fiction has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly, among others. She was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago X Stylist short story prize. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, is published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and forthcoming from Doubleday in the US.

Articles Available Online


Lena Andersson's ‘Acts of Infidelity’

Book Review

July 2018

Sophie Mackintosh

Book Review

July 2018

Acts of Infidelity is the second novel by Lena Andersson that follows unlucky-in-love heroine Ester Nilsson, and it’s another scalpel-sharp look at a doomed...

Fiction

May 2018

Self-Improvement

Sophie Mackintosh

Fiction

May 2018

I had been sent back from the city in disgrace, back to my parents’ house in the country. It...

I’m a woman who’s been through terrible trauma I’m a woman whose first husband committed suicide, and whose second husband woke up out of a dead sleep, murdered her son, then killed himself   Kamal woke up, killed Mahmoud, and threw himself off the balcony   Kamal woke up, killed Mahmoud, and threw himself off the balcony Right from the start, from the beginning of the beginning, I never blamed Kamal for killing Mahmoud Kamal is forgiven: he had a whore for a mother and a bastard for a son, and it’s at those two, bastard and whore, that the fingers of blame should be pointed Not at Kamal, who was a victim the same way that I was a victim, and more so The whore mother I’d already killed, but the bastard son, who’d played the lead in Mahmoud’s death, what were we going to do about him?   Justice is that the killer dies, right? That’s what I know That’s what everybody knows, though they might deny it   Hours I spent on Facebook, hunting for Haytham Kamal, trying every play on the name I could think of, until I found him, and sent him a Friend request Then nights, scrolling down his wall I wanted to know what he was doing, where he went Where I could find him, so I could kill him, so I could make the world more beautiful, if only for a while Okay, I was telling myself, I’ll kill him, and I’ll turn myself in to the police, and I’ll go to prison   But as I was hunting Haytham on Facebook, I was also searching on Google, looking up Qanater Prison I wanted to be fully prepared I packed a few changes of clothes and a toothbrush Wasn’t leaving anything to chance   When they took me to prison – when I took myself to prison – I wanted to be ready   I’m a woman who’s taken what people aren’t made to take So what do I do? Die? Can you do that? Suffer all that trauma and just make up your mind to lie down and die? Well, yes, of course you can, but what I’m saying is: that’s not

Contributor

April 2016

Sophie Mackintosh

Contributor

April 2016

Sophie Mackintosh’s fiction has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly, among others. She was the winner of the...

Grace

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

Sophie Mackintosh

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

14. It comes for me in the middle of the day when I am preparing lunch, quartering a tomato then slicing each segment in...

READ NEXT

Feature

Issue No. 19

Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

Feature

Issue No. 19

My mother recently found some loose diary pages I wrote in my first year of boarding school, aged eleven,...

poetry

January 2016

Meteorite

Liliana Colanzi

TR. Frances Riddle

poetry

January 2016

The meteorite retraced its orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until a passing comet pushed it...

Art

October 2013

At the Tate Britain: Art Under Attack

Joe Moshenska

Art

October 2013

Iconoclasts have never known quite what to do with the ruined fragments that they leave behind. If we imagine...

 

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