Joanna Pidcock | Tolka, Web Only, September 2023 Um, so, it’s strange, isn’t it? Yes, it is, in a good way. I first became aware of my double when I was shortlisted for a major literary prize, only to find that she had won it two years earlier, making my own effort look like a funny mistake. Within this context, I simply looked exactly like her, only spelled slightly differently, misspelt even. have you seen this?? was the most common text I received in the days following the shortlist announcement, coupled with a link to some page with her photo and her achievements and her name, is this you?? In the weeks following this uncanny coincidence, I uncovered more: as well as having very nearly the exact same name, my doppelgänger and I had both moved to the UK from former colonies (she, Canada; me, Australia); were both ‘nature writers’,...

Brian Robert Moore | Tolka, Web Only, June 2023 In Italy, no author is as commonly associated with auto-fiction – or with the murky limbo that exists between fiction and non-fiction – as Walter Siti. Through his first three novels, which formed a ‘fake autobiography’ culminating with Paradise Overload (Troppi paradisi) in 2006, Siti proved that the self can be as effective a means as any for probing the obsessions, ills and ecstasies that characterise contemporary Western society. Even as the figure of Walter Siti has moved into a secondary role in much of his writing, his novels have continued to meld an almost investigative rigor with emotional depth and a uniquely propulsive style. By portraying and deconstructing contemporary Italy from the inside, Siti’s writing has captured how no facet of modern life – even, or especially, love and sex – can exist detached from macro systems of money, media...

Ana Kinsella | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 Entry My first home in London is a houseshare with five Icelandic artists. The flat is a maisonette with a small garden on a Shoreditch housing estate, and the garden is neglected, with a fringe of bamboo taller than any of us. I find it through a friend of a friend and take the room without viewing it. These facts are enough to make me feel legitimate and deft at being in the city, despite my newness. I’m a natural. It is not my first time living away from home, but it is the first time that it feels meaningful, a page turned rather than merely interrupted. I have a job, sort of, and a course of study, and people to have dinner with at the wide pine table whose grooves and knots I can still feel under my fingers. The East...

Niamh Campbell | Tolka, Issue Two, Dec 2021 I am, in this memory, five years old. I do tap-and-jazz class with my little girlfriends: Lindsey, Fiona, Karen (latterly, in Australia; a yoga teacher; last seen stealing boyfriends at the debs). We return from the hired lodge by the Protestant school – where we dance to ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’; where the air is grainy with dust motes and fragrant of sweet, decaying orchard fruit – via the drained mill pond and contained land-water cataract known to the small town as the canal. We do this every week and the route remains in my memory with strange vividness. On this day I skip ahead of the group and the mother-chaperone to cross a concrete bridge which, if you run through it, produces a tinny echo not unlike the tup-tup-tup of tap and jazz. Spinning out at the...