Granta | The Home of New Writing

Vampire

And Never Come Up

John Biguenet

‘Was there a story? Yes, there was always a story .Did you write this one down? I've written them all down’.

Johnny

John McGahern

The Ruttledges saw Johnny resting in the shade of the alder tree at the gate,...

The Assassin

Henk van Woerden

‘He stabbed the man in front of him yet again, three more times, before he was overpowered by the bystanders.’

Henk van Woerden on the assassination of the South African Prime Minister in 1966.

Famous People

Orhan Pamuk

‘Life is dull if there's no story to listen to or nothing to watch’.

Honolulu Hotel Stories

Paul Theroux

’The Christmas carols in Waikiki were being sung in Japanese‘.

Goodbye, Mother

Hanif Kureishi

‘If you think the living are difficult to deal with, the dead can be worse‘.

Fit Mother

Peter Ho Davies

‘The court had given me six months to prove I was a responsible adult and a fit mother’.

Our Nicky’s Heart

Graham Swift

‘Frank Randall had three sons: Michael, Eddy and Mark. That was fine by him‘.

Then and Now

Daniel Meadows

’Daniel Meadows has traced many of the people he photographed then, but this is of little interest to us‘.

Exchange of Pleasant Words

Aleksandar Hemon

‘What year was it? We have chosen to believe it was 1811’.

Uncle Ed

Keith Fleming

‘Back in 1976 when I was sixteen, my uncle, the novelist Edmund White, rescued me from the messy aftermath of my parents' divorce and brought me to live with him in New York’.

Gifted

Richard Williams

‘The interim report filed by the investigator from the coroner's bureau listed him as a black male, 5ft 7in tall, weighing 1351b‘.

The Furnace

Lydia Davis

‘My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother’.

Closer

David Malouf

‘There was a time, not so long ago, when we saw my Uncle Charles twice each year, at Easter and Christmas’.

Asking for it

James Hamilton-Paterson

‘Having my hair cut one morning in February 1999, I fell foul of one of those barber-shop discussions which are a feature of life here in Italy’.

First Cut

Jonathan Kaplan

‘I grew up with the expectation that I would serve.’

Are We Related?

Linda Grant

My mother and I are going shopping, as we have done all our lives. ‘Now...

Into the Wind

N. A. M. Rodger

In the days of Francis Drake, the Armada and Queen Elizabeth’s war with Spain, the...

Trawling for Facts

Will Hobson

Less than one-hundredth of a per cent of the deep sea has been glimpsed; astronauts...

Snapper On Board

William Scammell

The Cunard’s Queens, the Mary and Elizabeth, each carried two thousand passengers and almost as...

Sea-Towers

Bella Bathurst

The lighthouse is petrified in affectionate memory. Its image has been used so often–by charities,...

The Case For Butterfish

Neal Ascherson

The ship had left the port of Varna in Bulgaria, the passengers had dined and...

9999

John Barth

The word odometer dates from 1791, but mileage indicators didn’t appear as standard equipment on...

Martha Gellhorn

Nicholas Shakespeare

‘What clipped the wings of her fiction and grounded her imagination was precisely what made her soar as a journalist.’

Ruchir Joshi | Interview

Ruchir Joshi

Writer and filmmaker Ruchir Joshi on his essay ‘Tracing Puppa’, Calcutta and his dreams of writing for Granta.

The Attacks in Mumbai

Rana Dasgupta

‘India is a garrulous place, and yet, during last week’s attacks in Mumbai, it became speechless.’

Daniel Alarcón | Interview

Daniel Alarcón & Helen Gordon

‘The strangest parts of a story are not necessarily the fictional elements.’

Editor’s Letter: The men who made us

Alex Clark

‘Time comes round and takes your stories.’

Cyan

Paul Farley

‘I’m holding out. / I’m blue in the face.’

Subject+Object: The fount of all smoky wisdom

Will Self

‘To explain what I now feel for the pipe I must paraphrase the writer Robert Stone’s remarks on hard drugs: I admire it from afar.’

Olga Grushin | Portrait of My Father

Olga Grushin

‘Things that aren’t done right away are never done.’

Doing the Paperwork: Life in the aftermath of a violent death

David Goldblatt

‘If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her it made the fight too hard.’

Portrait of My Father

Ali Smith

‘What you do is, you go up to it, and touch it.’

Ali Smith remembers her father.

Caterpillars

James Lasdun

‘But he had engulfed her somehow; taken up residence in her imagination like some large, dense, intractable problem that had been given to her to solve.’

My Father Myself

Siri Hustvedt

‘We are myriad, all of us.’