Nick Taussig has written articles for a variety of publications including The Independent on Sunday, Arena, Zembla, Staple, Roof and Society Today.
Society Today – Britain’s Foreign Bosses
Society Today, Vol. 1, No.3, Summer 2006 With a new world order where money is placed above all else, British corporations are increasingly looking beyond the Great Isle – to the international market of talented executives – in order to recruit the best person to drive up share prices and maximise profits: the candidate’s professional competence and business acumen is judged to be far more important than whether or not he or she is native-born, a British citizen. A quarter of the FTSE 100 companies have foreigners at the helm, from...
read moreSociety Today – Why Are They Begging?
Society Today, Vol. 1, No. 2, November/December 2005 This is the question on our lips when we walk past a man or woman huddled in the doorway of a shop front like some desperate animal, wrapped in a dirty blanket clinging to it for warmth, hiding a face smeared with grime and shame, and clutching a polystyrene cup with a few coppers in it. In one sense we are bloody foolish to even ask the question. Shelter is like food and sex – we need it – and if we don’t have it, then we’ll look for ways to get it. Let us be frank but the...
read moreRoof – Child Soldier
Roof, Shelter’s Magazine, October 2008 Imagine this. You are forced from your bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night, tied up and dragged off, half-naked and barefoot, into the wilderness. You are made to walk for twelve hours, then permitted to rest, but for no more than two hours, on hard ground, on a bed of leaves, in the dirt, damp and rain. You are not fed, just given water. And then you are ordered to walk again, for another twelve hours. This goes on for three days, and by the end of it you are starving and exhausted, and your...
read moreRoof – The Broken-Hearted
Roof, Shelter’s magazine, September/October 2006 The plight of the homeless first really dawned on me when I was twenty-one and living in America. My friend, Justin, and I were fast running out of money and needed work: we’d prepaid the rent on a short-term let – a poky studio flat just big enough to swing a cat in – and had just a few weeks remaining before we were out in the cold. Well, at least we were in Los Angeles, we told ourselves, the sun nearly always out in southern California. But, thankfully, work came in the nick of...
read moreIndependent on Sunday – Forced To Murder, Aged 10
Independent on Sunday, New Review, 7th December 2008 I first met Ojok Charles in August 2006. I was travelling in Central and East Africa, specifically Uganda, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was researching my novel, which is set amid the prolific brutality of the region, and I was looking for characters. Within hours of meeting Ojok, a fourteen-year-old with a pronounced limp and a heavy scar on the top of his head, I knew I’d found my human protagonist. Ojok’s slight build and baby face belied the...
read moreStaple – Getting In Print – the need, the sweat, and just a little luck
Staple, No. 69/70, Summer/Autumn 2008 Getting in print is damn hard these days, and you’re always going to need a little luck! If you’re not a celebrity – and preferably one that is a chef, model, singer, footballer, media pundit or talent show judge – then chances are you’re going to struggle. And even if you do manage to – to get an agent and convince a publisher to take a punt – you’ve next got to battle it out on the high street, a ruthless place where publishers and retailers increasingly tend to bet on just a few...
read moreArena – Don Don
Arena, 2007 When I set about writing my second novel I realized I had to get deep into the hearts and minds of two very different men – one, a brash and bullish American millionaire with a formidable appetite for self-gratification and excess; the other, a wise and noble Thai Buddhist monk who lives a life of compassion and restraint – and that in order to do this I had to, quite literally, become them. Imagination, though a critical tool for the writer, has its limitations: it does not enable him to get inside the bellies of his...
read moreZembla – It’s Me, Eddie, by Eduard Limonov
Zembla, No. 9, Winter 2005 The obscure book I’d like to tell you about is Eduard Limonov’s autobiographical work, It’s me, Eddie (or, in Russian, Eto ia – Edichka). Limonov was the enfant terrible of Russian letters in the late ’70s and ’80s, an identity he openly welcomed. His purposeful, vigorous and flamboyant assault both on Mother Russia’s sacrosanct literary canon and her moral consensus makes even Michel Houellebecq seem rather tame, even – would you believe – conservative. His rebellious...
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