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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...

Suicide without a cause, or silent sacrifice for an apparent cause which, in our age, is usually political: a woman can carry off such things without tragedy, without even drama — Julia Kristeva   I   I return to a former self, ghost or shadow self emerging from a glimmering light;   Woolf’s ‘luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’   Life as circularity, inevitable return to a womb-like space, a space of the maternal?   Where do the dead go after they die? What nether region do they inhabit?   Where did the Hakka people come from? Peripatetic tribe from north-east China   She comes from people without a home, or fixed position She is condemned and doomed to wander looking for her place in history   I conjure up the past, delving into the recesses of unknown memory and time   I am returning to the source The original source The point of all our origin But these origins go further back beyond Western tradition, beyond the story of holy innocence fabricated in the myths of Adam and Eve, and the notion of a God the father And it does not reside in the maternal womb either, that place of warmth and nurturance, which begins with love   I invite mystery I return to our innate energy, excavating deeply layer upon layer of our consciousness   I breathe in the light; I inhale deeply and exhale   Where is the point of our origin?   I am digging deep I have to go further than the surface of things, back through space and time   I uncover hidden treasure buried for centuries, and carefully retrieve it for future purposes   Filtering through the coloured papers of memory, those delicate, fragile and carefully processed pieces of our past and history felt in my bones and body   In the beginning there was the Word And the Word is me My words become me, and I become the word, a flurry of mixed phrases, half-spoken sentences, articulate in their gibberish   I try to find the language that defines me, become a whirling dervish, caught up in a veil of spinning letters They fly around me, and I try to catch them   In the beginning there was

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...

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Interview

July 2015

Interview with Sarah Manguso

Catherine Carberry

Interview

July 2015

There’s a certain barometer of a writer’s achievement that urban readers know well: did this book cause me to...

poetry

January 2012

Mount Avila

W. N. Herbert

poetry

January 2012

‘el techo de la ballena’   Time to be climbing out of time as the wild city rates it,...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Manfred Mohr

Alice Hattrick

Interview

Issue No. 1

Lines of varying thickness rotate on black. On the screen beside, tilted away from the first, is a slide...

 

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