In Conversation|The Online Edition

Patrizia van Daalen, Peng Lun & Ted Hodgkinson

‘Young perspectives always facilitate access to a culture because they are more easily accepted, and it is easier, most times, to assimilate with them.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Florence Boyd & Ted Hodgkinson

‘There is a dichotomy of darkness and beauty within things that we can’t confront head on.’

Art & Photography|The Online Edition

Laura Oldfield Ford

‘Walking around the perimeter of the Olympic site has become an act of remembrance.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

Don Paterson

Don Paterson reads his poem, ‘The Self-Illuminated’ in memoriam Peter Porter, from Granta 119: Britain.

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Hear why Mark Haddon likes to go down to the pub after reading the latest issue of Granta, and where Junot Díaz first discovered the magazine.

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Sam Byers & Ted Hodgkinson

‘She lived in fear of him saying something interesting, which might make her fall in love with him; or something horrific, which would shatter the illusion she’d so carefully constructed.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Simon Armitage & Ted Hughes

An unpublished letter by Ted Hughes, introduced by Simon Armitage. ‘It’s reassuring to see a spelling mistake (‘style’ for stile), and I love the maps.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Various Contributors

‘There is something about a gathering of 150 poets and writers that makes me think about justice and hope, about the possibility of seeing the world differently.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

Jynne Martin

‘It is the hour for farewells. It is the hour.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Léonie Hampton & Yuka Igarashi

‘I see a dichotomy at play where I am trying to be truthful, but it’s hard to be direct.’

Fiction|The Online Edition

Tessa Hadley

‘We had each needed the other for something, which wasn’t kindness or love. We’d both had dry husks for our hearts, that day.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

Lorraine Mariner

‘On one of those mornings / when I felt like resigning / from my life.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Rachel Seiffert & Yuka Igarashi

Rachel Seiffert reads her work and talks to Granta about writing silences, the inescapability of history, the Troubles and learning to love her characters.

Fiction|The Online Edition

Carys Davies

‘His name was Arthur Pritt, he said, and he was sorry for the day.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Evie Wyld

‘Peckham is the place of my adolescence, my first cobbled together attempts at dressing myself from the charity shops on Rye Lane.’

Fiction|The Online Edition

Emma Martin

‘This was a tiredness that caused Hannah to walk into a travel agent in Clapham High Street on a grey Tuesday morning and buy a ticket to New Zealand.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Emma Martin

‘I’ve occasionally caught a kind of self-consciousness stalking me when I write about New Zealand.’

Fiction|The Online Edition

Andrea Mullaney

‘I did not meet my husband until six years after he died.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Andrea Mullaney

‘To move past the ugly parts of history, you have to acknowledge them, on all sides, and this is what I think historical fiction can do so well: show how we got from there to here.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Michael Symmons Roberts

‘The rich, tomato red that decorated most of my bedroom – curtains, lampshade, bedspread – and the pale, rinsed-out blue like a milky north-west sky that represented the other side.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Ian Teh & Ted Hodgkinson

‘The pictures I take are fly-on-the-wall and open to interpretation.’

Fiction|The Online Edition

Alan Warner

‘Each man’s right hand was stained black with glossy wet muck.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Tash Aw

‘It was as if he was consciously trying to fashion an image for what he wanted the country to be: ultra-confident and unapologetic, not just severing all links with our colonial past but sticking a bold middle finger up to it while we strode chest-out into the future.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Tania James & Saskia Vogel

‘Write the story that unsettles and excites you, that keeps you coming back to your desk.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

James Lasdun

‘Blizzard died. I’m remembering / his limitless affection.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Nadifa Mohamed

‘I became English by osmosis; a new sense of humour, altered manners, an alternative history filtering through my old skin.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Nick Papadimitriou

‘His imagination lingers in the woods and fields like a slowly drifting plant community and then dissolves into ditches lined with black waterlogged leaves – a residue of previous summers – and the ghosts of dead insects.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Mark Haddon

‘Sean finds a log to use as a shooting gallery and sends Daniel off in search of targets.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

Kaddy Benyon

‘Sometimes I am so afraid my envy / will hack at your figs, strawberries, / or full-bellied beans, I dig my fists / into my pockets and nip myself.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

Sean Borodale

‘To be honest, this is dark stuff; mud, tang / of bitter battery-tasting honey. The woods are in it.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Gillian Clarke

‘Poetry must always find new ways to sing, must be fresh, must surprise, must take us by the heart with its song, its imagery, its syntax. But it can still be simple, grammatical, and speak plain English.’

Fiction|The Online Edition

Lawrence Norfolk

‘After a turn they came to a high arched entrance from which cooking smells drifted.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Sean Borodale & Ted Hodgkinson

Ted Hodgkinson interviews Granta New Poet Sean Borodale.

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Kapka Kassabova

‘My arrival in Edinburgh seven years ago was almost a blind date.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Cynan Jones & Ted Hodgkinson

Cynan Jones spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why he doesn’t want to be defined as a Welsh writer, the pleasures and challenges of writing short stories and novellas and writing about the growing pains of adolescence.

Art & Photography|The Online Edition

Justin Coombes

‘From this, I developed the idea of the kingfisher’s search for a nest taking place over the course of a day, and this day being a microcosm of her world and a greater search for home and for meaning.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Francine Prose

‘Anglophilia is constantly thrumming on, or just under, the surface of our culture.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

Jamie McKendrick

‘When my father saw an advert in the Echo / for a big house at a peppercorn rent / he rang.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

A.L. Kennedy

‘But London has always been impossible and yet possible and has always called me.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Pico Iyer

‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’

Poetry|The Online Edition

Huang Canran

‘Two friends, who hadn’t met in a year / sat chatting in a house.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Alice Xin Liu & Shen Congwen

‘Shen’s novels, which had him often referred to as the Chinese William Faulkner, had a pastoral quality that did not serve a political purpose.’

In Translation|The Online Edition

Wang Yin

‘Paper phantoms sit beside me / watching a two-hour movie.’

Art & Photography|The Online Edition

Mishka Henner

‘There is of course an absurdity to these censored images since their overt, bold and graphic nature only draws attention to the very sites that are meant to be hidden.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Toby Litt

‘Literature isn’t alien to technology, literature is technological to begin with.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

John Burnside

‘I was marking a stack of essays / on Frank O’Hara / and each had a Wiki- / paragraph to say / who Genet was.’

Fiction|The Online Edition

Andrés Neuman

‘Like him, the bathroom mirror had lost brightness over the years.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Humera Afridi

‘Pakistan is a nation of memory keepers. We feed our memories as if they are guests at tea, pay homage to them.’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Caspar Henderson

‘Often, a road is the least interesting path to follow.’

Fiction|The Online Edition

Etgar Keret

‘I want to I want to I want to I want to I want to I want to I want to.’

In Conversation|The Online Edition

Catherine Chung & Patrick Ryan

‘I think that my appreciation of what’s considered beautiful or elegant in math definitely carried over into what I appreciate in other fields as well. ’

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Soumya Bhattacharya

‘There is no escaping the fact that parenting involves treasuring those rare moments of solitude.’

Poetry|The Online Edition

John Burnside

‘Shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty / pomegranates drying in a bowl, / mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats.’