Life of the Father
Sort by:
Bastard Alias the Romantic
Yuri Herrera
‘Can you imagine what it would be like if instead of killing we cuddled?’
things that didn’t happen
Sarah Moss
‘Suddenly, your heart began; suddenly in the darkness of your mother’s womb there was a crackle and a flash and out of nothing, the current began to run.’
Nuala O’Connor and Siobhán Mannion in Conversation
Nuala O’Connor & Siobhán Mannion
‘I’m always interested to hear about people’s writing spaces; I presume the canary is a quiet bird.’
Eat You Up
Kathleen Murray
‘Wasn’t it possible the mental shit would leave the kid’s brain, cell by cell, just by doing normal stuff?’
Sally Rooney and Joanna Walsh in Conversation
Sally Rooney & Joanna Walsh
‘What I’m trying to do is to find ways of expressing myself which try to subvert those forms in order to make the speech act, or the writing act, transgressive in a way.’
The Hand’s Breadth Murders: Out-takes
Gus Palmer
‘You could look all over the world without finding traditions that have lasted as long as the ones here.’
Navigation
Lisa McInerney
‘His aberrations are formless; he imagines his insanity as a sort of gaseous molecule, looking to react with bugs and glitches.’
Emma Jane Unsworth and Rachel B. Glaser In Conversation
Emma Jane Unsworth & Rachel B. Glaser
‘Fiction is like those amazing robots that build other robots.’
Ethelbert and the Free Cheese
Lance Dowrich
‘It was against the understood traditions of society to prepare Sunday lunch without macaroni pie.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for the Caribbean.
Shifting Ground
Una Mullally
‘Living in the only democratic country in the world with a constitutional ban on abortion, I felt an acute and visceral shame.’
Five Things Right Now: Lucy Caldwell
Lucy Caldwell
Lucy Caldwell is the author of three novels, numerous stage plays and radio dramas. Her debut collection...
Eel
Stefanie Seddon
‘The eel I saw was the one lying deep and quiet and alone in his coppery pool in the bush.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for Europe and Canada.
Blue Hills and Chalk Bones
Sinéad Gleeson
‘One day, something changes; a corporeal blip. For me, it happened in the months after turning thirteen: the synovial fluid in my left hip began to evaporate like rain.’
Han Kang in Conversation
Han Kang & Max Porter
Han Kang visited the Granta offices to discuss her book Human Acts.
The Pigeon
Faraaz Mahomed
‘The pigeon and I have a very warm and comfortable relationship.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for Africa.
Inside the house
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
‘the bell / was ringing from the chapel, they were there / expecting her.’
Pure Gold
John Patrick McHugh
‘That icy fear of the morning after slithered back: why does summer always feel like it belongs to someone else?’
Our Private Estate
Dave Lordan
‘Dozens of votive candles held aloft by mourners in white suits in procession. So much white, as if death could be engulfed in it, as if death itself was not an all-engulfing whiteness.’
Cow and Company
Parashar Kulkarni
‘And now there were four of them stepping out to look for a cow.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize overall winner.
Mayo Oh Mayo
Nuala O’Connor
‘Tonight there is a moon-rind, a nicotined fingernail, hanging low over the lake; above it, a Swarovski sparkler of a star.’
Black Milk
Tina Makereti
‘Despair sat on her shoulders where her wings should have been. Darkness consumed her, the quivering lip of a dying abalone, grease in the barrel of a gun.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for the Pacific.
Republicans
James Pogue
‘This American says he’s heard of Cross but that he’s still just passing through.’ He laughed and formed the shape of a pistol with his right hand. ‘Well you heard that part, didn’t ya? That is one thing that will never change here.’
Tara Bergin | Five Things Right Now
Tara Bergin
Tara Bergin’s first collection of poems, This is Yarrow, was awarded the Seamus Heaney Centre...
First Sentence: Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’
On Shakespeare and the Quest for Belonging
Minal Hajratwala
‘We may not belong to Shakespeare, nor he to us, ever.’
Shakespeare for Children
Sarah Moss
‘I can’t think, my mother said as we sat down, why people think a play that’s all about unsanctioned sexual desire is suitable for little girls.’
Cracking Up
Kevin Breathnach
‘It has been several weeks since I slept for more than an hour, and lately I’ve been feeling on the verge of cracking up.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘But Ireland is Ireland. It resists and relishes its own national images in equal measure.’
The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion
Kevin Barry
‘If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place. Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.’