By Tom Miller The best guitar maker in Cuba. Three events—baseball, Pope Jon Paul’s visit, and the Elián González case—exposed Cuba to the American public far beyond the embargo. Yet it was the improbable success of a handful of aging musicians that exposed a Cuba few knew and expanded the country’s audiences far beyond its […]
By Erin Byrne Little by little, his spirit expanded in harmony with the cathedral.—Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame She’s had many lives and here was the burnt offering of another. Notre Dame’s lace spire sizzled and crumbled as it fell, and the gigantic hole it created became a cauldron. Flames, golden to orange […]
By Chase Nelson A modern-day rescue mission raises questions of life and death. With her husband looking on, we took turns pumping her heart for her, pushing blood to her organs, to her extremities, hoping for a gasp to bring her back, tearful and afraid, from wherever she was now. Technically, they were called compressions. […]
By Amanda Castleman Navigating grief with the Okavango Delta’s last generation of Bushmen hunter-gatherers. When he was 15, Ditshebo “Dicks” Tsima took his spear into the bush. Hunting was still legal in Botswana’s Okavango Delta then, so he could follow an ancient coming-of-age tradition, practiced for around 200,000 years by his people: the Bushmen. Most […]
By Sivani Babu Grand Prize Bronze Winner in the Thirteenth Annual Solas Awards We push through a sea of people and cows, the dust and smog swirling red and heavy, giving the scene around us the hazy air of a vintage photograph. A calf chews languidly on a banana as flies buzz around its head. […]
By Matthew Félix Grand Prize Silver Winner in the Thirteenth Annual Solas Awards I’ve traveled extensively. But you’d never know it from the looks of my apartment. Between an almost obsessive insistence on traveling light—never carrying more than one backpack, which fits into any overhead bin—and a general aversion to accumulating things, I hardly ever bring back […]
By David Robinson Grand Prize Gold Winner of the Thirteenth Annual Solas Awards In 1965, I was driven across the Sahara by a woman whose real name I never knew. I’ve been trying to find her ever since. I was working in Nigeria at the time. In West Africa, even if you never see the […]
By Juilene Osborne-McKnight Grand Prize Bronze winner of the Twelfth Annual Solas Awards Trastevere They have cleaned the fountain in the Piazza of Santa Maria in Trastevere. This means that it no longer works. Water spills over the basin and down the sides. On the lone dry step, the King of the Gypsies has taken […]
By Aaron Gilbreath Within Tokyo’s populous Shibuya ward lies the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing. By some estimates, 2,500 people cross here during rush hour each time the signal changes. Locals call it “The Scramble.” Every day, over two million passengers pass through neighboring Shibuya Station, commuting to work and enjoying the area’s countless shops and […]
By Angelique Stevens It was a full moon, which meant from my vantage point, I could see his naked silhouette shining blue as he washed his body behind the big lorry. I was naked too, behind the Land Rover. The body was so familiar, that wiry frame, those graceful hands, the shaven head and the […]
