The Source

The Ghosts She Felt Acutely

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots as a literary magazine in the 1920s, when our undergraduate contributors (including Evelyn Waugh, Graham...

The Source Polina Kim -

Letter from the Orient

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots...

The Source Dara Mohd -

A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots...

The Source Jim Weinstein (pseudonym) -

Rhonda May

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots...

The Source Matthew Unwin -

Latest

Return to Oxford

"A peal of percussive raindrops tumble from towering heavens. A lonely leaf joins the fray in a willowing, whispering wash."

Verbalisation

"Then there is a sudden pull – my loose thoughts spill over the pebbly surface of the page. Images crashing and breaking against sobering stillness, propelling seafoam into the air, rumpling the Edenic crispness of the page."

Paying Attention

"I wrote that the world feels too much of everything, that I am so lucky to be in it."

Time spent in Oxford

"The photographs on the walls show people years ago in the same spot. Did they feel the same, love the same, breathe the same. It seems impossible that they did, even more so that they did not."

Ode to the Sunflowers my Dad bought for me

"You – yellow in 5 Acts, yellow in division to make up a whole – belong to the morning"

Freshers’ Flu – Why My Mum Invented COVID

"Two cultures, both alike in dignity In times of (un)fair Corona, where we lay our scene From ancient tradition one plans to be set free where alcohol makes the liver unclean From forth the fatal minds of these two foes Parents worry they'll lose the apple of their eye; with misadventures and revealing clothes Do with Fresher's Week her dignity will die."

Four Children

"And I sat with my back to the skies as I mouthed out a prayer to the winds and imagined them ghosts; for where I sat, half-anaesthetised, four children had used to sit"

Essay Crisis

People often say that progress, is not always linear. and p r o g r e s s, sometimes doesn't always look like 2,000 words* (including citations) on a Microsoft Word document"

My Dog and Its Owner

"My dog had lost its collar in a cave, Whereto, through chasing night, astray it ran After my whistle panicked in its ears."

The Sword-Cross

"A warrior of Palestine Traversed with a Cross for sword, From Babylon to Jerusalem, Until he spoke not word."

Veraneio

"Raised in the endless, relentless summer of tropical living, snapshots of summer swamp my memories of childhood – beachside days, aching sunburns, blond locks tainted unflatteringly green by chlorinated pools."