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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

Scholastique Mukasonga is Rwanda’s most celebrated author Her eight works of memoir and fiction, all written in French, reckon with the country’s tumultuous twentieth century in graceful prose distinguished by its warmth, directness and moral charisma Combining the authority of traditional storytelling with the techniques of the social novel, her books explore themes of mourning and remembrance, female community, education and the insidious legacy of Rwanda’s Christianisation At their centre lies the struggle of Rwandan Tutsis, who suffered decades of violence and displacement before the genocide of 1994   Born in 1956, Mukasonga spent most of her childhood in a resettlement village on Rwanda’s outskirts, expelled with her family and thousands of other Tutsis by the independence era’s Hutu nationalist government She overcame poverty and strict ethnic quotas to attend college for social work, but fled the country in 1973, when Hutu classmates assaulted her and other Tutsis amid widespread killings Mukasonga moved to Burundi and then Djibouti before settling in Normandy, where she was living when the genocide killed thirty-seven members of her family She lost both of her parents and all but one of her siblings; their village was effectively wiped off the map   Grief and the determination to rescue her loved ones from oblivion would inspire Mukasonga’s first two memoirs, Cockroaches (2006) and The Barefoot Woman (2008) After their success, she began writing fiction, winning the Prix Renaudot for Our Lady of the Nile (2012) The novel brilliantly allegorises Rwanda’s 1973 unrest – a harbinger of the genocide – through the intrigues of a Catholic girls’ boarding school for daughters of the elite An equally magnetic film adaptation by Atiq Rahimi debuted earlier this year   Inspired by her mother’s storytelling, Mukasonga’s later fiction has turned decisively towards Rwanda’s traditional culture, which she sees as a bulwark against racial division The stories in Ce que murmurent les collines (What the Hills Murmur, 2014) reach back to the advent of colonialism and the collapse of Rwanda’s ancient monarchy, while her most recent novel, Kibogo est monté au ciel (Kibogo Went Up to Heaven, 2020), features a rogue native priest defrocked for syncretising

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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Interview

July 2014

Interview with Geoff Dyer

Tom Overton

Interview

July 2014

‘I’ve always believed that an artist is someone who turns everything that happens to him to his advantage’, Geoff...

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Issue No. 5

The White Review No. 5 Editorial

The Editors

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Issue No. 5

One of the two editors of The White Review recently committed a faux pas by reacting with undisguised and indeed...

Art

March 2011

Trafalgar Square Street Protests

Cosmo Hildyard

Joseph de Lacey

Art

March 2011

The following photographs were taken during the third day of student protests in London on 1 December 2010, a...

 

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