Mailing List


Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Interview with Sianne Ngai

Interview

October 2020

Kevin Brazil

Interview

October 2020

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements...

Essay

Issue No. 28

Fear of a Gay Planet

Kevin Brazil

Essay

Issue No. 28

In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by...

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze Artist Navine G Khan-Dossos painted the mural by hand, repeating a motif based on muqarnas – a kind of honeycomb vaulting used in Islamic architecture She moved across the wall on a scaffold, first with a cardboard template and later with paint, expanding the mural in careful variations of colour It shifts from red through to white, heating up at the centre and cooling at the edge, while kite-shaped inner pockets slide through shades of grey, complicating the relationship of flatness and depth   Echo Chamber is a portrait of a woman, although it would be impossible to tell without the accompanying text The woman in question, Samantha Lewthwaite (also known as Sherafiyah Lewthwaite), is a British Muslim who made headlines following her husband Germaine Lindsey’s involvement in the 7/7 London terrorist attacks in 2005 In the aftermath, Lewthwaite spoke out against his actions, but six years later she was charged by Kenyan police with possession of explosives She has since been dubbed ‘the White Widow’ by the press, a sensational moniker used for women radicalised at home in the west, who join the ranks of Islamic extremists   Born a year apart, both Khan-Dossos and Lewthwaite are white British women who became influenced by Islam as teenagers Navine G Khan-Dossos – an anagram for the artist’s birth name Vanessa Hodgkinson – moved to Kuwait in 2003, and later trained in traditional Islamic art in London Lewthwaite converted to Islam as a teenager, and married Lindsey in 2002, at the age of 19   Aside from an interview Lewthwaite sold to The Sun in 2005 denouncing her husband’s actions, she has not had much control over the dissemination of her story Journalists quote from her ‘diary’ – a set of papers seized in Kenya in 2011 – or cite tweets from a Muslim Youth Centre handle @MYC_Press that are rumoured to be hers, but neither are reliable sources Over the course of the years, Lewthwaite has been transfigured into a stock character in a cultural narrative, one that tells the tale

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Interview with Terre Thaemlitz

Interview

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Interview

March 2018

In the first room of Terre Thaemlitz’s 2017 exhibition ‘INTERSTICES’, at Auto Italia in London, columns of white text ran across one wall. Thaemlitz...

READ NEXT

fiction

September 2014

The Fringe of Reality

Antoine Volodine

TR. Jeffrey Zuckerman

fiction

September 2014

Many thanks to those who have allowed me to speak; now I’ll do so.   I’m actually not talking...

Interview

May 2011

Interview with Desmond Hogan

Ben Eastham

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2011

Desmond Hogan is probably the most famous Irish writer you’ve never heard of. In the early 1980s, with numerous...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Birch

Thomas Chadwick

Prize Entry

April 2017

1997   Business boomed. Optimism was shooting up everywhere and bursting into flower. Music was jocular. Sport was effusive....

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required