But What Have I Said?

ALISON GIBBS examines how characters are shaped by politics in Nadine Gordimer’s short story, ‘The Catch’: ‘While Nadine Gordimer was known for both her fiction and her outspoken opposition to apartheid in her native South Africa, she always insisted that politics was not the driving motivation for her stories.’

The Tyranny of History

FARAH AHAMED, runner-up in the 2018 Feature Writing Competition, explores the shifting nature of political and historical events in short stories by R.K. Narayan and Ivan Vladislavic: ‘Every society feels it has evolved a greater understanding of a truth and seeks to entrench this belief, forgetting that in time new realisations will lead to a new dismantling, discarding and repositioning to find a hard-won balance that will also prove temporary…’