Granta | The Home of New Writing

Means of Transport

Best Book of 1891: The Birds of Manitoba

Sylvia Legris

‘During the pandemic, birds (along with many insects and wild plants) have landed in my life and poems again.’

Best Book of 1978: Who Do You Think You Are?

Emily LaBarge

‘I have read them so often that sometimes I cannot remember what is mine and what is hers’

Best Book of 1992: The English Patient

Stephanie Sy-Quia

‘I had been in England, a semi-foreign country, for a few months, and when I was asked where I was from, I had no easy answer.’

Best Book of 2019: Better Never Than Late

Ukamaka Olisakwe

‘This book is about how to navigate the thorny valley of dead dreams. Some will survive the ordeal; others will tip over the edge, irredeemable.’

Best Book of 1886: The Masterpiece

Summer Brennan

‘Zola’s characters are, in every sense of the term, art monsters.’

Best Book of 1959: Mrs Bridge

Sindya Bhanoo

‘When the book was published, my own parents were children in India, then a newly independent nation.’

Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger

Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler on why The Years of Anger by Randall Swingler is the best book of 1946.

Best Book of 1480: MS Egerton 1821

Elvia Wilk

‘The original owners of many devotional books kissed, licked, rubbed, scratched at, and cried upon their pages.’ Elvia Wilk on the best book of 1480.

Best Book of 1998: Symbiotic Planet

Daisy Lafarge

‘Symbiogenesis is horizontal and anarchic, a frenzy of illicit fusions and mergers – energies coming together for mutual benefit.’

Daisy Lafarge on the best book of 1998.

Best Book of 1924: The Beggar

Bill Manhire

‘I still have, somewhere at the back of my head, the notion that there are real poets out there and that all the rest of us are just pretending.’

Interview

Daisy Lafarge

‘The earliest life on the planet was life without air, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to pollute the atmosphere’.

Two Poems

Jason Allen-Paisant

‘in iron lignum vitae / wind and leaves / keep memory’

A Bleed of Blue

Amy Key

‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’

Two Poems

Amit Chaudhuri

‘It was chick peas that kept you alive.’

The Want

Cyrus Simonoff

‘It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it.’

On Diane di Prima

Iris Cushing

‘Sex flowed into art, art flowed into livelihood, livelihood flowed into poetry, poetry flowed into friendship, friendship flowed into sex. The entirety of this life was sacred.’

Withstances

Rowan Evans

‘yours is no magic    is only wyrm sickness’

The Lye of the Land

Derek Gow

‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’

In Conversation

Ruth Padel & Ilya Kaminsky

‘Lines collect for years, but once in a while these lines meet up, and wink at other lines, go tangoing and make out, and a baby gets born – which is to say a stanza or if I am lucky the whole poem.’

Ways of Knowing

Lauren Wallach

‘Maybe I was born with this face the way moths are born with the ability to blend in with bark, to survive.’

Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin

Robert Becker

‘This place, where the temperature drops noticeably as you walk into it from the road, survived William Stanley Merwin as equal parts oasis, stage set and work of art.’

Scapegoat

Katharine Quarmby

‘In 2000 the Disability Rights Commission was founded, to push for equal rights for disabled people. It had a major job on its hands, listening to and acting on individual cases – access, transport, discrimination – and getting the 2005 Disability Discrimination Act onto the statute book.’

Introduction

Isabella Tree

‘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.’

Shifting Baselines

Callum Roberts

‘Younger generations accept as normal a world that seems tainted and degraded to older people.’

The Ard, the Ant and the Anthropocene

Charles Massy

‘I had somehow compartmentalised my mind: nature and my farm landscape stood either side of a deep chasm.’

Holding Up the Sky

Rod Mason & Charles Massy

‘Fire, wind, rain. We’re gonna meet all them three one day, all together, fire, wind and rain, all together one day very soon if we don’t do something about what’s happened and happening.’

Third Eclogue of the Vegetable Garden

John Kinsella

‘What you don’t know set / against all you want to know’

Symbiotic Rootscapes

Merlin Sheldrake

‘Symbiosis – the intimate association formed between different species – is a fundamental feature of life and enables new biological possibilities. Mycorrhizal fungi are some of the more striking examples.’

Water Is Never Lonely

Judith D. Schwartz

‘This water isn’t irredeemably lost, after all. It has merely been waiting for companionship.’

Survivors

Adam Weymouth

‘Salmon are the ultimate survivor. They’ve survived ice ages and cataclysms. But are they going to survive humans? It’s dubious, isn’t it?’

Creep

Caoilinn Hughes

‘She hadn’t been skiing since her master’s in Iceland, back when glaciers had some heft to them, though slackened and fast-diminishing as the legs of a retired cyclist.’

The Secret Loves of Flowers

Dino J. Martins

‘The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden and often so brief that if you literally blink you might miss what exactly is going on.’

Of the Forest

Manari Ushigua & Zoë Tryon

‘We Indigenous peoples know how nature works, how water, mountains, trees function and relate to each other, how stars in space are connected with the earth.’