‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
Kathmandu, 1983. I was eighteen. In the Office of Controlled Immigration where my three school friends and I extended our visas, billboards shed notices like autumn leaves – photos of missing persons, stolen passports, wanted men: drug traffickers, art thieves, fraudsters, lost souls. One night Ch…
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘The soil itself is filled with divine feminine energy. It’s alive, it’s pulsating.’
‘Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in such clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future.’
‘The burden in law on the pregnant person is to show that they are at risk, in need; they must ask, and hope, rather than demand.’
Memoir by Andrea Brady.
‘On Good Friday, the priest in the livestream video stood inside the darkened sanctuary.’
Fiction by Nicolette Polek.
‘They queue up to pass, lap / like waves beside her, to receive the darshan / from her one, black eye.’
Poetry by Phoebe Power.
‘Having spent two months travelling in the primary rain forests of Borneo, I thought that a four-month journey in the country between the Orinoco River in Venezuela and the Amazon in Brazil would pose no particular problem.’
