Dispatch

One Sunday afternoon in April, sitting in his family home in Nairobi, Adrian Waweru followed a routine familiar to thousands of ambitious young Kenyan writers: he went looking for a commission.He didn't bother browsing traditional journalism job boards or

"Spirit says there's a woman standing right behind you," warns the Reverend Louis Gates, as his eyes begin to flutter in their sockets. A heavy silver pendant hangs around his neck. He speaks softly."Oh yeah, she's right there. She's old. She just keeps s

The thwup-thwup-thwup of a helicopter announces another load of oil workers returning from the North Sea. It's been three weeks since they last stepped foot on shore. Any minute now, they'll file into The Spider's Web, right next to Aberdeen Airport, for

McCall Weibel has finished both the Chicago and Salt Lake City marathons, but she has never run in a race against 60 horses. Ahead of her 40th birthday, she decided to remedy that. The Utah native flew to London and booked a three-hour Uber to a tiny town

There's one particular family memory that sticks clearly in Claire's mind, of her son Daniel as a toddler, in mid-2000s Dorset. "It was like one of those idyllic holiday days from a TV show," she recalls. "We'd been on the beach all afternoon. Daniel was

Newhaven's West Beach has been closed before. During the First World War, the East Sussex town, just 65 nautical miles from Normandy, became a supply port for the Western Front, and the beach was closed as a matter of national security. When the railway c

It is dinner time at Barrett Brown's flat. In the cramped kitchen, two locals whom Brown calls his "cholos" are cooking huevos a la mexicana and beans. A jumping mixture of The Doors, David Bowie, and MF Doom blares from a knackered, old laptop. Mice dart

The circus, as ever, had landed. It always does. It has come to Chingford in cycles for as long as this stretch of the London-Essex border has been turning out footballers, and it arrived this year with a particular intensity - partly because the England

It takes around 60 days to turn a human body into compost. The process is surprisingly simple. A body is placed inside a sealed vessel, covered with straw, alfalfa and wood chips, and left for bacteria and microbes to do what they've always done: return f

On 30 August 1994, amid news that the IRA was preparing to end its armed campaign, Belfast poet Michael Longley wrote what would become his most celebrated poem. "Ceasefire" recounts the final scene from The Iliad, in which a grieving King Priam persuades