Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing
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Morrison Okoli (1955-2010)
Jekwu Anyaegbuna
‘It is always an honour to have women cry during someone’s burial, but yours is too silent for comfort.’
Anushka Jasraj | Interview
Anushka Jasraj
‘I’ve never really had any readership, apart from fellow writers who have been forced to read my stories in writing workshops.’
Radio Story
Anushka Jasraj
‘We have been married five years – too soon for us to take pleasure in each other’s absence.’
A Walk Through Manchester
Michael Symmons Roberts
‘The rich, tomato red that decorated most of my bedroom – curtains, lampshade, bedspread – and the pale, rinsed-out blue like a milky north-west sky that represented the other side.’
Ian Teh | Interview
Ian Teh & Ted Hodgkinson
‘The pictures I take are fly-on-the-wall and open to interpretation.’
Granta in Bulgaria
Ilija Troyanow
‘Leafing through old issues is like marvelling at the showroom of a renowned jeweller.’
Look East, Look to the Future
Tash Aw
‘It was as if he was consciously trying to fashion an image for what he wanted the country to be: ultra-confident and unapologetic, not just severing all links with our colonial past but sticking a bold middle finger up to it while we strode chest-out into the future.’
Tania James | Interview
Tania James & Saskia Vogel
‘Write the story that unsettles and excites you, that keeps you coming back to your desk.’
Fragments of a Nation
Nadifa Mohamed
‘I became English by osmosis; a new sense of humour, altered manners, an alternative history filtering through my old skin.’
Scarp | New Voices
Nick Papadimitriou
‘His imagination lingers in the woods and fields like a slowly drifting plant community and then dissolves into ditches lined with black waterlogged leaves – a residue of previous summers – and the ghosts of dead insects.’
Nick Papadimitriou | Interview
Nick Papadimitriou & Ted Hodgkinson
‘I found that the torrent of inner voices I habitually heard began to organise itself in relation to the landscapes I passed through, the things I saw.’
Rice Cakes and Starbucks
Esther Freud
‘When the Lindens arrived in Los Angeles it was raining. Not drizzling, or even pouring, but streaming down outside the glass doors of the arrivals lounge in thick, grey sideways slices.’
Mark Haddon | Podcast
Mark Haddon
‘Sean finds a log to use as a shooting gallery and sends Daniel off in search of targets.’
Two Poems
Kaddy Benyon
‘Sometimes I am so afraid my envy / will hack at your figs, strawberries, / or full-bellied beans, I dig my fists / into my pockets and nip myself.’
Two Poems
Sean Borodale
‘To be honest, this is dark stuff; mud, tang / of bitter battery-tasting honey. The woods are in it.’
Blue Sky Thinking
Gillian Clarke
‘Let’s do this again, ground the planes for a while and leave the runways to the racing hare.’
Poetry in Britain
Gillian Clarke
‘Poetry must always find new ways to sing, must be fresh, must surprise, must take us by the heart with its song, its imagery, its syntax. But it can still be simple, grammatical, and speak plain English.’
John Saturnall’s Feast
Lawrence Norfolk
‘After a turn they came to a high arched entrance from which cooking smells drifted.’
Sean Borodale | Podcast
Sean Borodale & Ted Hodgkinson
Ted Hodgkinson interviews Granta New Poet Sean Borodale.
Poets, Politics and Coca Tea
Valerie Miles
‘Poetry can grab you unawares, overwhelm you. The tears came like a hard rain falling.’
Stevenage
Gary Younge
‘In 1988 my mother took the bus to Stevenage town centre to do the weekly shop, came home and died in her sleep.’
The Making of the English Landscape
Simon Armitage
It’s too late now to start collecting football shirts,/bringing them back from trips abroad as souvenirs:
When You Grow Into Yourself
Ross Raisin
‘A few drivers had slowed to look up at the side of the coach as it circled the roundabout.’
Silt
Robert Macfarlane
‘This is the Broomway, allegedly ‘the deadliest’ path in Britain and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked.’
The Celt
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘He stood, rubbing his arms. How long had he slept? Not knowing the time was one of the torments of Pentonville.’
Lion and Panther in London
Tania James
‘Gama has defeated them all, and more, but how is he to be Champion of the World if this half of the world is in hiding?’
The Self-Illuminated
Don Paterson
‘One, perhaps his psalter, / the other, a manuscript, or a portable altar.’
The Dig
Cynan Jones
‘In the car lights he could see just beyond the runs the bodies of cars like some disassembled ghost train littering the field.’
The Gun
Mark Haddon
Daniel stands in the funnel, a narrow path between two high brick walls that join...
Cynan Jones | Podcast
Cynan Jones & Ted Hodgkinson
Cynan Jones spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why he doesn’t want to be defined as a Welsh writer, the pleasures and challenges of writing short stories and novellas and writing about the growing pains of adolescence.
Granta Italy 3 | Interview
Paolo Zaninoni & Ted Hodgkinson
‘I do not feel our authors set out to reflect their age or their epoch: they are not into literature as sociology.’
