Granta | The Home of New Writing

Sunjeev Sahota | Podcast

Pretty Polly

Shinichi Hoshi

‘Compared to all of you, I’m not the handsomest guy or the smartest, which might’ve caused me all sorts of grief if I was a landlubber. But I spent my life at sea, so I got by.’

Paris Desert, Tokyo Mirage

Hitomi Kanehara

‘What I thought was the world yesterday, today I couldn’t even touch its outline.’

Two essays by Hitomi Kanehara.

Podcast | Joanna Kavenna

Joanna Kavenna

‘We all now exist as avatars, on shining tiles in these cubist landscapes’

Joanna Kavenna discusses her all-too-familiar surveillance dystopia, Zed.

One Hundred Years and a Day

Tomoka Shibasaki

‘After a while people’s faces began to fade, and they came to seem like hoards of noppera-bō, faceless spirits gliding by.’

Two stories by Tomoka Shibasaki.

Cheating

Ahmet Altan

‘I get into the police car with four officers from the Anti-Terrorism Branch. They are taking me to the prison.’

Two Poems

Kim Min Jeong

‘You think I like being called Cherry / because your cat’s named Cherry?’

Shame

Mieko Kawakami

‘During sex, Narumi would picture herself as steamed rice being turned into mochi rice cakes.’

North Winds Blow the Leaves From the Trees

Yu Miri

‘I liked her quiet regard, the way it gave me a sense of loneliness.’

Nightingale

Marina Kemp

‘She knew it was a trick of the lonely to favour the rude to the simply unmoved; that the loneliest thing in these villages and in this most tucked-away of professions was to elicit no response at all.’

Marina Kemp’s debut novel Nightingale is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.

An Unnecessary Man

Maha Harada

‘I’d lived for half a century, but I had no sense of what that meant; no particular reaction.’

Tongues of Fire

Seán Hewitt

‘Waking, close to morning but still
a shuttered, metal dark in the room’

Two poems by Seán Hewitt from Tongues of Fire, shortlisted for the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

The Bookmobile

Kotaro Isaka

‘He told me he had quit his job the day after the earthquake and came out here with nothing but a sleeping bag.’

Podcast | Caleb Klaces

Caleb Klaces

‘I think the infrastructure of community around fathering is very limited.’

We discuss Caleb Klaces’s debut novel, Fatherhood.

Two Poems

Hirata Toshiko

‘If I go to the window, / it could easily turn into bullets or rabbits.’

VIO

Kanako Nishi

‘I had an odd feeling as I regarded Yō, who knew things about me that I hadn’t known.’

Inferno

Catherine Cho

‘My son was eight days shy of his 100-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes.’

Catherine Cho’s Inferno is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.

Surge

Jay Bernard

‘The black is coming in from the cold,
rolling up the beach walls, looking for light.’

Two poems by Jay Bernard, from their debut collection Surge, shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.

The Death of Distance

Samrat Choudhury

‘It might take only one soldier being shot across the Chinese–Indian border for war to begin. The howitzers, tanks, missiles and fighter jets are lined up, ready and waiting for action.’

A Ghost in Brazil

Kikuko Tsumura

‘I was ever so keen to visit the Aran Islands, but unfortunately, I died before ever making it out of Japan.’

Podcast | Sophie Mackintosh

Sophie Mackintosh

‘Imagine if an alien came to earth and asked, so how to you reproduce?’

We discuss Blue Ticket and the body horror of motherhood.

Larger Than the Night

Masatsugu Ono

‘The night was sealed off completely – or so it seemed.’

The Only Way Out Is Through

Hana Pera Aoake

‘Hiding in kumara pits on the side of volcanoes, I was born with an egg inside me ready to be baked.’

Podcast | Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh

‘Unless you are completely shut down and in denial, there’s no way you’re getting out of this without having changed.’

Ottessa Moshfegh on 2020 and her new novel.

Four Poems

Bill Manhire

‘There is only one of me, she says, / but we all know there are two.’

Fossil Dinner

Daisy Lafarge

‘The poor dish looks just like me.’

On Meeting Margaret Busby

Sarah Ladipo Manyika

Margaret Busby was Britain’s first Black woman publisher. At the age of twenty, she was also one of its youngest.

Summer. Gates of the Body.

Galina Rymbu

‘I want to eat your rough hand that caresses me.’

Podcast | Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado

We discuss the dilemmas presented by her new memoir, In the Dream House.

‘What does it mean to present a face of one’s community that isn’t commonly seen, and that might be seen as bad PR?’

Girl Games

Makena Onjerika

‘There, behind glass panes separating you from the good children, from life itself, you are kept company by your dread.’

The Hole

Hiroko Oyamada

‘The hole felt as though it was exactly my size – a trap made just for me.’

Nocturne

Yūshō Takiguchi

Jesse Kirkwood’s translation of ‘Nocturne’ by Yūshō Takiguchi is the winner of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize.

Podcast | Momtaza Mehri

Momtaza Mehri

We discuss her collection, Doing the Most with the Least, on the Granta Podcast.

‘don’t be / shocked when I say I was in prison you’re still in prison that’s / what this land means prison.’

Selfish Little Thing

Olivia Rosenthall

‘I began to lie awake at night thinking about all the terrible things I’d ever done, listing them quietly in my head, each selfish little thing, my body numb with guilt.’

Podcast | Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill

We discuss her new book, Weather, on the Granta Podcast.

‘Yes, it's dire. Yes, we're not sure what to do. Does that mean we have nothing to do?’

Sleeping Beauty

Laura Demers

‘It’s normal not to be offered anything to eat or drink when you are a princess.’

Slobber and Drool

Jess Arndt

‘My face, not the glass, was blurry. I had no idea what I really looked like besides lumpy, fuzzy, profuse.’