United Kingdom
Author of three books of fiction: This Way to Departures, Above Sugar Hill and Risk. Working in radio and print. Co-presenter of Why Why Why: The Books Podcast.
During WWII, Britain deported some civilians classed as 'enemy aliens' to Australia.
When John Provan received a phone call from the director of the military broadcast service, the American Forces Network (AFN), asking him to take a look at some of the material they were getting rid of, he had no idea what he was going to find.
West Germany became home to between 15-20 million American soldiers and their families as well as civilian employees during the Cold War. And some stayed when their posting was over. We spoke to three such former GI's about what brought them here and then brought them back again for good...
I wheel my suitcase through Southern Cross Station in Melbourne in April 2016, passing the electronic ticket machines and sushi stands. I am on my way to a place that my father traveled to more than seventy-five years before, when he was a detainee sent to Australia by the British government.
In January of 1988, I was in Nicaragua, in Estelí, a pro-Sandinista city. Ostensibly, I was there for an intensive Spanish course, but of course you don't go to a country at war to learn a language. Estelí was battle-bruised, with bullet holes in the sides of the rough cement buildings, potholed roads, open sewers in the street.
The tenants at Grenfell Tower saw the danger, noted it when they walked into their building at night, and reported it - just like the tenants in the building that collapsed in Harlem more than 20 years before. And, just like the tenants in Harlem, they understood that "only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord."
It doesn't take a genius to see that the structures in America that favour the white and well off, regardless of ability, are paralleled in England.
I can't help viewing what is happening through the shadows of my family history - the possibility of brutality in a place you once considered safe, the possible need that the people you care about might need to prepare for sudden flight, the idea that the time when you can flee or change things may quickly pass; there might come a time when it's too late.
There are plenty of books by writers who arrive in New York City, make it their home, and start chronicling it - amazed, amused, appalled, daunted, delighted, frustrated. And, most of all, viewing the city, to quote William Styron, as "a place as strange as Brooklyn."
Linda Mannheim talks to Irenosen Okojie about Speak Gigantular. Speak Gigantular has been called “a startling short story collection from one of Britain’s rising literary stars, weaving together the grand aspects of myths and fairy tales with the dark but all-too-real depths of human nature."