There's a Street in My Neighbourhood
Writers share memories of an area they love and the communities that made them.
Les mecs
Our building on the Boulevard de Magenta had seen better days, but the rent was cheap and we were in a hurry: I was eight months pregnant and we needed a place to live. It was a run-down old Haussmannian building above a Franprix and a job centre, but up on the fifth floor there were sweeping views of the rooftops and the Église Saint-Laurent, and we fell in love.
On Muckross Head
I spent a lot of my youth adrift; living and working across many parts of the world, but I didn’t experience homesickness until I was about 29. It took me a while to diagnose myself as the homesickness was manifested abstractly and came and went in quick flashes.
Snowy peaks in Alaska
The main street in Palmer, Alaska, is much prettier than it once was. The snowy peaks of the Chugach mountains have always dominated the horizon, but for most of my childhood the street itself was run-down. The side roads were unpaved, and in the summer the dusty air made it feel like a frontier town.
A noisette over a pétanque rink
If I walk out of my flat in Paris, past the baker's and down the rue Riquet, in a couple of minutes I will reach the Bastringue. The café sits on the corner, looking out over the gritty pétanque rinks, the dog walkers and the grey-green canal beyond.
Les mecs
Our building on the Boulevard de Magenta had seen better days, but the rent was cheap and we were in a hurry: I was eight months pregnant and we needed a place to live. It was a run-down old Haussmannian building above a Franprix and a job centre, but up on the fifth floor there were sweeping views of the rooftops and the Église Saint-Laurent, and we fell in love.
Mumbai is singing
The noises I hear from my homes have changed drastically in the last few decades. Now, I can hear leaf-blowers, the occasional singing child or bird, or a car engine. Mostly nothing. Back then, it was sound soup: hundreds of honking cars, dozens of shouting vendors and barking dogs, then the explosion of a brass band leading a wedding procession.
A workaday wonder in Rome
I used to live among lions in the Okavango Delta, where the light changed and I saw something new every day. I never thought a city could match the wonder of day-to-day living in the wilderness. Rome has. I have lived here for eight years, and it surprises me constantly.
'You’ll never gentrify the Bush’
Writers get used to spending a lot of time alone, thinking stuff over, feeling moody. Indolence is indispensable, I have to remind my agent. When I lived in West Kensington between the mid-seventies and the late eighties, after I finished writing for the day at five o’clock, I would trot down to the Three Kings on North End Road. It was always pretty empty. I’d read the papers and drink a couple of pints with the other ghosts, old men in tired suits. It became a habit.
Palermo wakes early
Via Fillippo Cordova is a mundane street north of the centre of Palermo. My flat is an unfinished apartment on the roof of a tower block, with views of the ships in port, the Favorita football stadium, the Ucciardone prison, where Mafiosi poison each other, and Monte Pellegrino, the majestic rock which overlooks the city, and Palermo’s domes and spires. I have moved to Sicily to become a writer and I cannot believe my luck.
A restaurant in the corner of Lviv's Old Market
I first saw Staryi Rynok — the Old Market — in Lviv in the winter of 1995. I have a photograph of myself standing on the snow-covered pavement, wearing a fur hat. Nobody would dream of wearing such a hat now in Ukraine — they are associated with the past, and with Russia.