Freedom Papers: Commissioned Writing

In 2018, we invited 51 authors to contribute to The Freedom Papers - a series of essays exploring ideas about freedom. First published in a 160-page supplement to Gutter Magazine, which became the highest selling title across the Book Festival's bookshops in August 2018, the essays can be read below.

Visit guttermag.co.uk to purchase a copy of The Freedom Papers.

Supported by the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund through Creative Scotland.

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Johnny B. Crude
Johnny B. Crude by Olumide Popoola

There is freedom that emanates when you speak your name, when you use your voice. It reaches beyond the outcome. The act of enunciation is a conjuring, a testament, a moment that signifies your existence while generating a future…

On Freedom
On Freedom by Yaba Badoe

I belong to a generation of Africans born as a wave of nationalist movements on the continent which led to independence in the 60s. I’m from Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, the first African nation to break free from colonial rule…

Jinny's Freedom
Jinny's Freedom by Eloise Greenfield

A few years now since Freedom, and Jinny is happy much of the time…

What Is To Come
What Is To Come by Ever Dundas

Freedom is a world without capitalism…

The Good Conduct Medal
The Good Conduct Medal by Sandip Roy

I was eight years old when I won a Good Conduct medal at my school in Kolkata. It went perfectly with the side parting in my hair, the handkerchief in my pocket, the black-rimmed spectacles…

A Voice of One's Own
A Voice of One's Own by Chitra Ramaswamy

I once interviewed a woman, a famous, glamorous novelist about to go stratospheric, in the private lounge of a five star hotel in London…

Elders
Elders by Kathleen Jamie

Under the plastic lid, a tundra landscape, as seen from the air. Blooms of bottle-green, circlets of paler green, of faun…

Free to Pray
Free to Pray by Leila Aboulela

Every Friday, when my son, Kareem, was 13 years old, I would pick him up from school at noon and drive him to the mosque to pray. Friday prayers are mandatory for Muslim men (optional for women) and I wanted Kareem to become accustomed to this practice…

Total Freedom
Total Freedom by Carmen Maria Machado

In Borges’ 1939 essay “The Total Library,” which later served as the basis for his short story, “The Library of Babel,” he imagined a library of infinite books, created of every conceivable arrangement of a certain kind of universal alphabet…

I Will Not Kick That Ladder
I Will Not Kick That Ladder by Michel Faber

In the early 1980s, I was one of immigration’s failures. Dutch by birth, I’d been granted “permanent resident” status in Australia, where I busied myself being an unemployed fringe-dweller and unpublished writer…

On Identity
On Identity by Afua Hirsch

“Freeing yourself,” wrote the author Toni Morrison in her book Beloved, “was one thing. Claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”…