Granta | The Home of New Writing

Wedding Day

I’ve Been Away for a While

Dan Shurley

‘When the world releases him from its oily grip will there still be a world?’

The Stinky Ocean

Ian Jack

‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’

In Bright Light

Paul Dalla Rosa

‘The hard thing, as Alice saw it, was that something bad had happened to her and it was private and then it wasn’t.’

In Medias Res

Jesse Darling

‘I walk the broken line like I once walked into the bar’

Colville

Fergus Thomas & Duane Hall

‘You can really feel the horses, when you’re around them, you can feel their spirit coming to life.’

When the Cholera Came

Lindsey Hilsum

‘It was hard not to wonder if the disease was a kind of divine retribution – collective punishment for a collective crime.’

Victim and Accused

Vidyan Ravinthiran

‘I’m curious about the refusal to countenance a connection between disparate experiences – a route by which empathy could travel.’

The Scarecrow

Diaa Jubaili & Chip Rossetti

‘Just at the time of the ceasefire between Iraq and Iran in 1988, an infantry platoon discovered that they were in a minefield.’

Translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti.

Abbandonati

Rory Gleeson

‘One day, 200 people’s X-rays showed they needed intensive care in order to survive.’

On a Farm near Junction City

Nate Duke

‘broiled thoughts / cool in labor’s mute thrum’

Al-Birr Islamic Trust Morgue, Greenwich Islamic Centre, April 2020

Gus Palmer & Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

‘Palmer’s portraits of Kafil Ahmed sit alongside those of other people risking their lives to take care of others.’

Naming

Jason Allen-Paisant

‘I have started to see that nothing is itself’

My Phantoms

Gwendoline Riley

‘I’m not sure I even thought of him as a person, really. He was more just this – phenomenon.’

The Mezzanine, or: The Most Important Book About Nothing You’ll Ever Read

Joel Golby

‘It’s like taking an escalator trip into someone else’s mind for an hour, finding nothing of actual substance up there, and realising, as you retreat mournfully back into your own skull, that there’s nothing there, either.’

Death Takes the Lagoon

Ariel Saramandi

Ariel Saramandi on the sinking of the MV Wakashio off the coast of Mauritius.

In Conversation

Nadia Owusu & Caleb Azumah Nelson

‘Out of those roots, radical possibilities bloom. Future is created with each note.’

Interview

Sonia Shah

‘Non-native species have been blamed for being invasive the way that immigrants have been blamed for causing crime.’

Two Poems

Holly Pester

‘Abuse is the conjuring of madness’

In Conversation

Ellen Coon & Isabella Tree

‘The soil itself is filled with divine feminine energy. It’s alive, it’s pulsating.’

The Valley and the Stream

Danyl McLauchlan

‘Why does serotonin make you happy? How does it affect mood? What is mood? What is depression? How does any of this stuff work?’

Your Delicate Body

Caleb Azumah Nelson

‘And it wasn’t that day, or the day after, but sometime after that, you cried in your kitchen.’

In Conversation

Peter Ho Davies & Celeste Ng

‘Some of the wisest things friends have said to me have been over text! But it’s a different kind of thinking.’

Asylum Road

Olivia Sudjic

‘She’d blinked at me kindly and said it must be sad when your country no longer exists, then returned to pulverising her asparagus.’

Notes on Craft

Ho Sok Fong

‘While writing we recover memories, recover moods, and we start to interpret them.’

Notes on Craft

Natascha Bruce

‘The reader doesn’t need to have answers, but they do need to have theories.’

Night as It Falls

Jakuta Alikavazovic

‘There wasn’t much money. His father had been blunt: the classes were fine, the rest wasn’t.’

Bleak Midwinter

Catherine Taylor

‘In a sense, we had been waiting for the Ripper to visit for months, even years.’

Notes on Craft

Rebecca Watson

I was possessed, for a year, by a woman whose name I do not know.

Laundry Bills and Manifestos

Francesca Wade

‘The great pleasure of archive work lies in searching for these secrets known and unknown.’

In Conversation

George Saunders & Natasha Randall

‘The way I write in general is basically just to move, in as a quiet-minded a manner as I can, toward what I feel as heat.’

Having and Being Had

Eula Biss

‘What does it say about capitalism that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?’

Disorientation

Ian Williams

‘The moment in childhood when one realizes that one is Black is profoundly disorienting.’

Four Poems

Sylvia Legris

‘Carboniferous cockroach. / Gregarious cockroach.’

Interview

Jay Bernard

An interview with the winner of the 2020 Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award.

Two Poems

sam sax

‘grief is an animal. we all know that. but which animal / exactly? what kingdom, what family, is it ever a fish?’

On Running

Larissa Pham

‘This makes more sense to me as a bodily practice: that desire to push one’s physical limits well beyond their natural bounds.’