Granta | The Home of New Writing

The Conveyor Belt

Eternities

Charles Simic

‘Could they be the same person?’

Nuestra Señora de la Asunción

Lina Wolff

‘No one here is normal except you, and you’re not even from Spain.’

The Man at the River

Dave Eggers

‘All he wants is to be a man sitting on a riverbed.’

String Theory

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

‘On tenterhooks / you think how string constricts, how / it connects, how you followed it back / to Rawtenstall.’

The Hudson River School

David Searcy

‘The coyote skull is on the table.’

A Rationalist in the Jungle

Héctor Abad

‘A pale-faced, near-sighted urbanite like me is nothing less than handicapped in the heart of the jungle.’

Tour Guide

Archive of Modern Conflict & Phil Klay

‘We record the reality we’re supposed to have, and then go back later and tell ourselves that it was the reality we experienced.’

Barrenland

A Yi

‘I no longer feared that she would entrap me; my heart would not soften.’

A Walk to Kobe

Haruki Murakami

‘What I’m talking about is a different sea, and different mountains.’ Haruki Murakami walks to his hometown after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995.

Compass Plant

Rachael Boast

One sprig should do, in a wayfarer’s satchel, to assist in losing all bearings until...

Seestück

Steffi Klenz

Artist Steffi Klenz recaptures portraits based on photographs of travellers, explorers and seamen who were lost in open waters, and whose bodies were never recovered.

The Best Hotel

Sonia Faleiro

I The village elder had recommended the hotel. He called it the best hotel in...

Geese

Ellen Bryant Voigt

there is no cure for temperament it’s how we recognize ourselves but sometimes within it...

Blood Money

Miroslav Penkov

‘At first the Gypsies didn’t know how to answer their cellphone.’

Water Has No Enemy

Teju Cole

‘The city is a sea that can swallow you at any time, a monster that can lash out without warning, a hell of variables and uncertainties.’

Wudang Mountain

Catherine Chung

‘The danger with chasing fantasies is that the reality is often so different than the imagination.’

There’s a Small Hotel

Andrew Holleran

‘Returning to Manhattan was like seeing someone who’d once been your lover but was now with someone else.’

The Two Gardens

Lorna Gibb

‘There are two gardens in my memory. The first was hidden behind the rows of shabby council houses where I grew up.’

Ross Raisin | On Tour

Ross Raisin

‘I was up at 5.30 this morning, to screaming, and it’s afternoon now and I’m covered in hummus and struggling to muster the energy to remove it from myself.’

Dutch Harbor Nights

Jim Ruland

‘When one of the fishermen starts belting out ‘All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Out Tonight’, it feels like a prophecy come to life.’

Two Poems

John Balaban

‘Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. / In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. / Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.’

Shobasakthi | Best Untranslated Writers

V. V. Ganeshananthan

‘Shobasakthi is also known as Anthony X; he is an ex-militant; he is an expatriate.’

In Cyberspace: a love letter

Joanna Walsh

‘I’m at a cafe table. It doesn’t matter which country. I’ve been travelling for a long time. By train. Nine, ten different countries in thirty days, a couple of nights in each, maybe three at most.’

War Letters

António Lobo Antunes

‘I’m doing my best to survive all this, but sometimes I feel so homesick that words simply empty of meaning.’

A Cloudless Sky

Michael Dickman

‘A cloudless sky and I’m back / an ice-cold sky-blue rag / for my eyes’

Handkerchief

Ghassan Zaqtan

‘Nothing’s left to say between us / everything went / into the train that hid its whistle.’

Petar Delchev | Best Untranslated Writers

Miroslav Penkov

‘I’m talking now of Mr Delchev’s bravery; of his books rightly loved by a faithful following of Bulgarian readers; of his words, still untranslated, which one day, I hope, will ring out in many foreign tongues.’

A. Igoni Barrett | Interview

A. Igoni Barrett & Ted Hodgkinson

‘Fixing the rhythm of one sentence in the novel I’m working on is more vital for me than any considerations of where I’m coming from or where my work is headed.’

How to be Gay and Indian

Manil Suri

‘This was supposed to be my great in-your-face coming-out campaign, which I’d fretted over for months beforehand. Had India suddenly lost its conservativeness, turned enlightened, even hip?’

Inner City

Lauren Beukes

‘It has taken this to make me realize that de-humanizing is not only something that other people do to you. It can be self-inflicted too.’

Granta Sweden | Interview

Johanna Haegerström & Saskia Vogel

‘If there are any tensions between Swedish writers it has more to do with style: writers who incline towards a more classical, epic storytelling versus writers who engage in more experimental uses of language.’

Guadalupe Nettel | Best Untranslated Writers

Santiago Roncagliolo

‘When I met her, I kept thinking: is she looking at me? Or rather, is she looking inside me?’

Kettly Mars | Best Untranslated Writers

Edwidge Danticat

‘Ms Mars is a singularly gifted writer, who with each new work delves more profoundly into themes that are both timely and essential.’

Rebecca Solnit | Podcast

Rebecca Solnit & Yuka Igarashi

Rebecca Solnit discusses interweaving personal narratives with the lives of Mary Shelley and Che Guevara, paradoxes and Beyoncé.

Remembering Iain M Banks

Stuart Kelly

Stuart Kelly remembers Iain Banks, and assesses the influence he's had on this generation of writers.