Long conversations, published as they happened, minus the throat-clearing. A translator, a chef, a policy writer, a violinist, a landlord. Nothing about "having it all". Everything about deciding what you have.
"I turned down two restaurant groups the same week. Both offered me the same money, and both wanted my name on the door. But I wanted my hands in a kitchen, and I wanted the kitchen to be open at three in the morning. So I built the canteen instead."
A midwife-turned-policy-writer on what the working day actually ends at, how she wrote the paper that changed her own salary, and what a woman inherits when she inherits time.
On translating a novel across five cities in eighteen months, why she does not answer the phone before eleven, and the precise moment she realised she was being paid to disappear into someone else's voice.
The soloist on ritual, superstition, hotel rooms, and the distinction — very real, she says — between practising and rehearsing. "One is a private conversation. The other is a public promise."
A former hotel receptionist who now owns a small apartment building in Roma Sur, on the exact conversation with her mother that made the down payment possible, and the terms she now uses in her own contracts.
The point of an interview is not to make the subject sound clever. It is to make the reader recognise, in a stranger's answer, the sentence she has been avoiding in her own life.
— Vera Adamou, Interviews Editor