Granta | The Home of New Writing

Nuestra Señora de la Asunción

My Caine Prize Year

Olufemi Terry

‘I came away from these sessions convinced that I was no authority on my work, nor did I have any desire to be.’

Marcelo Ferroni | Interview

Marcelo Ferroni & John Freeman

‘There’s a vibrant new generation of writers, trying to do something very different with Brazilian literature.’

Edwidge Danticat | Interview

Edwidge Danticat & Ellah Allfrey

‘I am a writer who is shaped by everything that I have experienced and loved, including Haiti.’

The End of the Discussion

Patrick Ryan

‘I just never thought I’d see the day when Amtrak would start poisoning people.’

God and Fiction

Aleksandar Hemon & Stuart Dybek

‘Do writers of fiction have to create a cosmology in order to exist?’

Notes for a Young Gentleman

Toby Litt

‘A gentleman should greet with genuine warmth only the following persons – his sister’s daughters, his maternal aunts and his mortal enemies.’

Emily Berry | Interview

Emily Berry & Rachael Allen

‘I’m not even very comfortable being defined as a female poet. You never hear about ‘male poets’.’

The Old Fuel

Emily Berry

‘And I'm / cranking out oodles of love the way an old spaghetti machine / cranks out spaghetti.’

Paolo Zaninoni | Interview

Paolo Zaninoni & John Freeman

‘After almost three years of economic recession and youth unemployment estimated at around twenty per cent, it is fair to say that Italian attitudes towards work have become more serious.’

Generations

Rebecca Swift

‘Yet Grandma did talk to me that afternoon, and it was as if a wild flower had grown out of the rubble, survived for a day and then disappeared.’

Taiye Selasi | Interview

Yuka Igarashi & Taiye Selasi

‘I was rather surprised to discover that I’d painted such a devastating portrait.’

Accidental

Sadaf Halai

‘Of the 36 views of Fuji, this one is the strangest: / the great wave off Kanagawa, frozen and tempestuous, / both sound and silence.’

Marriage Lessons from My Turkish Grandmother

Sevil Delin

‘The stories my grandmother, my anneanne, told me when I was a child are anything but children’s stories. They are folktales that have a common theme – the triumph of wily wives over evil husbands (jealous, repressive skinflints) through crafty subterfuge.’

A Revolution of Equals

Lana Asfour

‘Women have rights and we’re not going to lose them now.’

Fortunate It Is If Her Skirts Do Not Catch Fire

Amy Gerstler

‘I must remember god is not my private / secretary.’

Reading Women

Rachel Genn, Hannah Gersen & Tess Lynch

‘I realized that she was rebelling against a society that asked her to be noble when she was actually pissed off.’

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Special

Santiago Roncagliolo & Nell Freudenberger

‘Santiago Roncagliolo seems utterly unconcerned with whether we like his two characters, and (as in life) that fact makes them irresistible.’

Suddenly

Victoria Redel

‘A month after turning forty-five, every last egg in her body is a Rockette doing the can-can.’

I Like Being a Woman (And I Hate Hysterical Women)

Leila Guerriero

‘One day my father called me over to explain to me about the little seed, patting my head as if he were offering me his condolences.’

Zlatka

Em Cooper

Em Cooper responds to Maja Hrgović’s ‘Zlatka’ in Granta 115: The F Word.

According to Your Will

Naomi Alderman

‘Thank you, God,’ said the boys, ‘for not making me a woman.’ ‘Thank you, God,’ said the girls, ‘for making me according to Your will.’

Aftermath

Rachel Cusk

‘The gears of life had gone into reverse.’

Coronation

Gillian Allnutt

‘We waited quietly for the Queen who wasn’t there’

No Grls Alod. Insept Mom.*

A.S. Byatt

‘I already had a horror of being defined as a wife.’

The Children

Julie Otsuka

‘They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan.’

A Train in Winter

Caroline Moorehead

‘It was clear that not all would, or could, or would choose to, survive.’

A Kept Woman

Laura Bell

‘I find myself walking the high trail between fear and love.’

The Ojibwe Week

Louise Erdrich

‘Have you seen a beautiful naked antelope lady running through the streets?’

Night Thoughts

Helen Simpson

‘Don’t be such a MasculiNazi.’