Issue 5 of TAMARIND is now available for purchase in digital and for pre-order in print. All previous issues are also available to buy, while stocks last.

You can read and download current and past issues of the magazine online at read.tamarindlit.co.uk. Just enter your order number, issue number, and email address.

Poetry in a Petri Dish: Meeting Sudeep SenJhilam Chattaraj
Jhilam Chattaraj is an academic and poet based in Hyderabad, India. Noise Cancellation is her latest collection of poems. Her works have appeared at Calyx, Room, Colorado Review, Ariel, and World Literature Today, among others.

MercyAngie Lo
Angie Lo is currently doing an MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College London. She is a reviewer for Consilience and has had poetry featured in several publications, including The Trinity Review and Acta Victoriana. ‘Mercy’ is her debut short story.

Back and Forth with Oscar Wilde’s Son, Mandira Pattnaik
Mandira Pattnaik is the author of collections Anatomy of a Storm-Weathered Quaint Townspeople, Girls Who Don’t Cry, and Where We Set Our Easel. Mandira’s work has appeared in a variety of magazines and journals. She writes columns for Reckon Review, and edits for trampset and Vestal Review.

The Portico Library: Lights, Alicia Sometimes
Alicia Sometimes is a poet, multi-media artist, and broadcaster. In 2021 she completed the Boyd Garret residency for the City of Melbourne and a Virtual Writer in Residency for Manchester City of Literature and Manchester Literature Festival. She is director and co-writer of two science-poetry planetarium shows.

If There Is a God in Heaven You Shall Surely See Him, David Sheskin
David Sheskin is a former university professor of psychology. A writer of fiction and an artist, his work has been published extensively over the years. His most recent books are Art That Speaks, David Sheskin’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and Outrageous Wedding Announcements.

Under a Full Earth, Anthony Regolino
A Finalist in 2020’s 1st Quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest, Anthony Regolino has had his fiction and poetry included in various anthologies devoted to fantasy, horror, science fiction, crime, and comedy. He worked as an editor, ghostwriter, contributing writer, and has composed blogs professionally for major companies’ websites.

The Intersect of Poetry and the Chemical SciencesStephen Paul Wren
Stephen Paul Wren worked in industry for many years and is currently senior lecturer in pharmaceutical chemistry at Kingston University in 2018. His poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and he has co-authored two books. Stephen also runs a Facebook group, Molecules Unlimited.

The Cost of HeliumKinneson Lalor
Kinneson Lalor is a mathematician and writer living in Cambridge, UK with her chickens and her dog. She has a PhD in Physics and an MSt in Creative Writing. Her collaborative poetry collection about Alan Turing and AI, Machinations, was published by Trickhouse Press in 2022.

In Conversation with Rob Appleby
Rob Appleby is a professor of physics at the University of Manchester and a member of the Cockcroft Institute of Accelerator Science and Technology. His science communication work has spanned projects with authors and film-makers; informal engagement in unusual spaces; and the use of music, sound and art to communicate science. He has worked on many books with Comma Press as an editor and consultant, including Litmus, When It Changed, and Thought X. His latest book with Comma Press, Collision, brought together authors with CERN physicists and engineers to create an anthology of short stories inspired by the organisation and its famous laboratory.

EDITORIAL

Across countless languages, light is a metaphor for knowledge and darkness for ignorance. Scientific knowledge, in particular, is characterised as a guiding light for humanity in times of profound change: ‘a candle in the dark’. 

Over the past year, the foundations of the world have been rocked by the mass adoption of generative artificial intelligence tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT. Nothing seems certain. We are being forced to re-examine where to draw the line between the artificial and the human; how to distinguish truth from falsehood; and what our relationship with labour could be. Science can help shed light on these questions, alongside other disciplines like philosophy, art, and poetry. 

In Issue 5, we join these conversations with literary explorations of artificial intelligence and other topical subjects. In these short stories, we travel from French Pondicherry during the ravages of the Great War to a space colony of the near future. We examine the relationship between science and literature with three essays suffused with poetry, and with an interview with particle physicist Professor Rob Appleby, co-editor of the experimental anthology Collision: Stories from the Science of CERN. The themes in Tamarind Issue 5 are also explored in excellent illustrations and photography from Ling-Hsuan Wang and Angel Li. 

We hope you find Tamarind Issue 5 as thought-provoking as we do, and that it can be one of many candles for you in this uncertain times.

The Tamarind Editors