Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

Cumbrian Fell Pony

Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall writes about the Cumbrian fell pony for Granta 142: Animalia.

American Maniac

Rafael Frumkin

‘I would peel wrappers off sandwiches, remove noodles from their boxes, fry up meat before any authorities had the chance to track me and my bounty down.’

Broken Animals

Britta Jaschinski

‘These bored, frustrated and hungry animals appear as reluctant figures in some unsolvable puzzle, or as victims of a grand experiment whose original purpose is lost in time.’

Slaughterhouse

Arnon Grunberg

‘I wonder whether there’s a real moral difference between killing an animal and killing a human being.’ Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett.

Winterkill

Cal Flyn

‘Wildlife foundations find themselves calling for the deaths of tens of thousands of wild animals.’

Swifts

Adam Foulds

‘Swifts come closer than any other creature to living in the sky and having air and ceaseless movement as their home.’

Loggerheads

Rebecca Giggs

‘What idiom or instrument captures how the weather is felt by the animals, in their bodies, their nests and niches?’

Jeremy Gavron | Notes on Craft

Jeremy Gavron

‘Is the conventional novel the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that most comforts us?’

Above the Tree Line

Teva Harrison

Teva Harrison visits and illustrates the Northwest Passage through the Canadian arctic for Granta 141: Canada

Han Suyin: A Friendship

Aamer Hussein

'Han Suyin, elegant postcolonial diva avant la lettre, icon of the new, nonaligned Asia, thorn in the side of the dying British Empire and the American Right.'

Webs of Fiction

Emma Glass

‘The complexity of stories is not singularly reliant on an abundance of words.’

When We Fight, We Have Our Children With Us

Madeline ffitch

‘We are all politically involved whether we like it or not, and children are already on the frontlines.’

Anosh Irani | Notes on Craft

Anosh Irani

‘The interiority that we keep speaking of in fiction is built on pain’

Tshinanu

Naomi Fontaine

‘Language is a risk that a nation takes. If a language survives, its people do too.’ Translated from the French by David Homel.