Granta | The Home of New Writing

Notes for a Young Gentleman

Zulu Romeo Foxtrot

Douglas Coupland

‘This inflexibility makes sense to a non-visual thinker, but to visual thinkers such dogma is depressing and sad, like forcing ballerinas to wear suits of armour.‘

I watched a man kill himself

Louise Dean

‘Continuity is what we dread, not The End.’

Letter From Pondicherry, India

Akash Kapur

‘When I was growing up in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the south-east coast of India, I would go with my family each Sunday to the beach.‘

Subject+Object
You can taste the clay

Hilary Mantel

‘It is slate, heavier than it looks: dull brown in colour, a little longer and wider than the palm of my hand.‘

The Paris Intifada

Andrew Hussey

‘In the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire wrote of Paris being haunted by its past, by ‘ghosts in daylight.’

Videos of the Dead

Rick Moody

‘We are the museum that turns away no party.’

Blitzed Beijing

Robert Macfarlane

‘It’s at night that you really notice the dust, because artificial light suddenly makes the fines visible.’

The Judgement of Lut

Tim Lott

‘The point is, in the tower, on that night, certain gods revealed themselves to one another and came into conflict.‘

The Aviators

Xan Rice

‘Some men live to fly, and Captain John Wilkinson was one of them.’

More Afraid of You

Joshua Ferris

‘On Bainbridge Island, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, there are two modes of living: downtown and inland.’

Bomb Gone

Owen Sheers

‘We had been driving along the Bay of Wrecks on the eastern coast of Christmas Island for over an hour and a half when we saw the flock of terns.’

This is Not About Me

Janice Galloway

‘My mother thought I was the menopause.’

Mordros: The Sound of the Sea

Kurt Jackson

Kurt Jackson is an environmentalist, ecologist and one of Britain’s leading artists.

Peter Hobbs | Interview

Peter Hobbs & Roy Robins

‘Illness is solitary, because suffering is something you always do alone.’

The East Anglians

Justin Partyka

For nearly a decade, Justin Partyka has been photographing rural lives in East Anglia.

Ghost Species | Video

Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane discusses his piece ‘Ghost Species’, published in Granta 102, and reflects on the future of nature writing.

Netherley

Paul Farley

For Granta 102, Paul Farley and Niall Griffiths returned to Netherley, on Liverpool’s north-eastern rim and the fringes of rural Lancashire, and to what remains of the housing estate where they grew up.

Jonathan Raban | Interview

Jonathan Raban & Helen Gordon

‘The term ‘man of letters’ now seems hopelessly archaic, but I’d like to think there’s still life left in the notion of the writer who’s just a writer.’

Evan James Roskos | Interview

Evan James Roskos & Roy Robins

‘There is a view of American men presented by the media – of men as boorish, insensitive, emotionally immature – that manages to underscore various stereotypes that I feel fiction and poetry have a duty to dismantle.’

Preparing for war in Iraq

Seamus Murphy

‘Playing the game instantly bestows honour upon the players, with the possibility of new recruits for the American forces in Iraq.’

Jim Magee’s Hill

Pamela Petro

‘No one who’s seen The Hill has been able to describe it to me without visceral discomfort. Actually, no one’s been able to describe it at all.’

Witness: Butterflies on a Wheel

Anthony Doerr

‘Butterflies: a long, shimmering curtain.’

Science: When the world turns ugly

Jim Holt

‘Disorder is the essence of global warming.’

Encounter: The visions of Kurt Jackson

Mark Cocker

‘A thing of colour and elemental contest and of beauty.’

Subject+Object

Seamus Heaney

‘Birch is the tree of desire, ashimmer with sexual possibility even when it arrives swathed in botanical Latin.’

Pathologies

Kathleen Jamie

‘It felt surprisingly good to be part of that rough tribe of the mortal.’

Second Nature

Jonathan Raban

‘Man is a visitor who does not remain.’

The Tree of the Cross

Richard Mabey

‘Spending the first half of my life in the Chilterns, in southern England’s chalk country, I grew up with yews.’

Ghost Species

Robert Macfarlane

‘On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost.’

Phantom Pain

Lydia Peelle

‘Something’s out there. Something has shown up in the woods of Highland City.’

Netherley

Paul Farley & Niall Griffiths

‘It still feels like the end of the line.’

The Migration

Edward Platt

‘It was like stepping into the interior of a submarine.’

Land’s End

Philip Marsden

‘Never by any chance will any wanderer from the world discover him in that illimitable wilderness.’

Conspiracy of Males | New Voices

Evan James Roskos

‘Nothing was your fault. You defended no one. By default, you defended us.’

On Sweden, state power and Susan Sontag

Sigrid Rausing

‘Sweden in a sense was a celebrity state because it had become globally symbolic of the welfare state, of high taxes, of sexual education and liberation.’

Lana Asfour | Interview

Lana Asfour & Roy Robins

‘I do find in fiction the greatest freedom and therefore the greatest potential meaning.’