Writer about places. Red Sands: Reportage & Recipes Through Central Asia, a ‘book of the year’ for New Yorker and FT. New book Cold Kitchen (Bloomsbury) out now
📚NEWS!
I'm thrilled to tell you that
@BloomsburyBooks
will publish my memoir, COLD KITCHEN - On Departures, Arrivals and Coming Home to the Table, in spring 2024. Weaving in and out of my subterranean kitchen, it opens in Uzbekistan and ends in Ukraine.
Armenia is suffering immensely at the moment. If you are thinking of visiting the South Caucasus this year, go to Armenia. Incredible food, wine, churches, trekking, music, art. Warm, generous people. Pain, yes, but much pride and hope. I left a sizeable piece of my heart there.
This is Odesa, the smartest, funniest, wiliest city on the Black Sea, filled with ideas and books and history. A city of good food, wine and music. A city of dreams.
To lose it to Putin and his mindless thugs is unimaginable.
A tigress roams through purple water hyacinths in India’s Pilibhit Tiger Reserve. A beautiful photograph that cannot help but lift the heart a little.
By Sanjay Nair for Mercury Press.
My 20-something friends here in Bishkek are certain about one thing: they want old men out and fresh blood and women in. Enough of the corruption of older male politicians, who readily switch parties to stay in power, they say. ‘They are ineffective and do nothing.’
Thrilled to announce that RED SANDS - Reportage and Recipes through Central Asia - will be out mid-November.
Named after the Kyzylkum Desert, the journey traverses mountains, sand dunes, cities and steppe.
And it has an identity! Here is the exuberant cover:
Leaving you with something different ahead of the weekend: this remarkable photo, taken in the summer of 1987, by photographer Paul Veysseyre.
It is a mansion, built on the remains of a Genoese fortress, on the Turkish Black Sea coast (near Ordu).
Coffered roofs in Uzbekistan decorated in traditional style.
Even the smallest towns employ painters and carvers to work on columns, panels and friezes.
It goes without saying that people are exhausted in Odesa - of air raids, missiles and war. But this girl, on Valentine’s Day, lit up the whole street with her smile♥️ (I asked if I could take her photo)
Sowing seeds in Ukraine, even in the midst of all this... The image is a photograph I took of a painting in Kyiv a few years ago. To me it symbolises Ukraine’s unique strength and resilience.
Meanwhile we’re in a bomb shelter in Odesa at 5am as Russia fires missiles at civilians in Ukraine for its nightly attacks. But sure, subways. Jesus Christ.
Snapshots of Odesa from six years ago. I was there researching my book ‘Black Sea’ and I fell in love, intoxicated its literary heritage, pickle-filled courtyards, and a very particular melancholy that comes in on the sea breeze... then suddenly leaves again.
Great photograph by Sergey Ponomarev in The New York Times today of Uzbek truckers having lunch as they wait for their turn to cross the Georgia-Russia border.
Wrote a piece for
@GuardianTravel
about how spending your holiday money this year in Poland - a country with a long history of resistance - can help support Ukraine.
Feat. my love of Polish soup, Adam Mickiewicz,
@zuzazak
’s cookbooks & Massolit bookshop
Margilan, in Uzbekistan, is famous for ikat and silk but the bread, too, is exceptional.
(Posting this simply as today is a rubbish day and this photo is uplifting)
Lviv. City of lions. Now hit by multiple cowardly missles. I was there in November and remember the smell of coffee on every corner, the tight courtyards, the trams...
“It is a city on the edge of many places, a space of constant insecurity” as wrote Philippe Sands of it.
Last night Red Sands won the André Simon award for best food book 2020!
Previous winners inc. some of my favourite writers: Claudia Roden, Rachel Roddy, Fuchsia Dunlop and Diana Henry so I am honoured (almost!) beyond words. Thank you to the judges and for all the kind messages.
Please share to raise awareness, a handful of journalists outside of Armenia have written this terrible situation up in international media and I hope more will, quickly. Things are truly desperate in Artsakh.
“After waiting for hours in a 🍞 queue, when it was finally my turn, there was no more bread left. For a mother, to have money in hand, but unable to feed your child… such a powerless feeling…”
Taguhi, mother of 1,5-year-old child
#NagornoKarabakh
#UNSC
#StopArtsakhGenocide
A photo I took in Odesa in the winter of 2017. The sky and the beautiful classical building in the colours of Ukraine 🇺🇦
I am at a loss today. Praying and hoping.
#StandWithUkraine
Red Sands was published, during lockdown, two years ago this week.
It was a real privilege to write it and to tell the stories of Kazakh bakers and dairy barons, Tajik botanists, Uzbek confectioners, and tales of Anna Akhmatova in Tashkent.
Dare I say: may be good for Christmas?
A food photographer in LA (
@marissamakes_
on Instagram) shot this picture of varenyky for
#CookForUkraine
and it’s so beautiful I’d really like it on my wall.
Book recommendation: just published and with proceeds going to
@PenUkraine
to help authors in need *and* with a foreword by
@AKurkov
- really beautiful chapters on art, architecture, ceramics, churches. Good for both those in-the-know and learning.
In Armenia, last summer, I was given a bag of apricots from these generous fruit pickers. I still dream of them and find myself picking up boxes of apricots in UK supermarkets but I always put them back down. They cannot compete, there is no point. Better to remember and imagine.
It is Ukrainian Independence Day. Hats off to
@JoannRandles
for this incredible photo in The Times today. It is young ballerina Kateryna Andrushyna, from Boryspil, dancing near Swansea where she has found a temporary home.
There are many outstanding things to eat in Georgia but more ought to be said about the tiny potatoes that are on menus come May. Served with green tkemali, sour plum sauce, and dill… I dream of these. Wish I was there.
“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no-one knows you and you hold life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.”
~ Hannah Arendt
I’ve had the same elderly Georgian driver drop me off and pick me up at Tbilisi airport during recent trips. This morning, at 5am, in a scrum of arrivals, he spotted me, pushed forward, shook my hand and held it - like I was family - until we were out of the arrivals hall 🥺