So We LiveThe novelist Alexander Baron (1917 1999) was born into a working class Jewish home in Hackney, joined the Communist Party as a young man, saw the thick of battle in Sicily and Normandy, and became one of the most admired writers of post war Britain. His first novel, From the City, From the Plough (1948), was acclaimed as the definitive novel of the Second World War, the first of a trilogy including Theres No Home (1950) and The Human Kind (1953). This

with the motley survivors of the massacre that inevitably comes

erupt from our minds if only for a moment

MORTIMER AT LARGE is a selection of the best columns written by Peter Mortimer since 2003

Peter van de Kamp was born in The Hague

Khairani Barokka and Daniel Sluman co-edit Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back

the founder of the first newspaper in Newark

• Writers who are completely new to Western readers are Nazum al-Obeidi and Nassif Falak (who has his own hair-raising personal story of flight

and the author was forced to join the Death March from Lydda

was nominated for a Grierson Award

The foreman gives the women the Company line: Go home and pray

but to those with wider postcolonial interests in the creolising process

his first novel