Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

The Bees

Dorothea Lasky

‘What is the swarm of bees that enters a poem when language is created?’

The Guests

Hisham Matar

‘Strangely, it was Joseph Conrad who introduced me to Edward Said and not the other way around.’

The Poetics of Trauma

Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson

Swedish poet and psychoanalyst Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson on trauma, silence and linguistic analysis of asylum seekers. Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves.

The Snow in Ghana

Ryszard Kapuściński

‘We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness.’ Translated from the Polish by William Brand.

The Ungrateful Refugee

Dina Nayeri

‘I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime.’ Dina Nayeri on growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To Zinder

Sven Lindqvist

Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.

Tom McCarthy | On Europe

Tom McCarthy

‘Like theatre itself, Europe is a contraption, a machine.’

Two Keiths and the Wrong Piano

Hanif Kureishi

‘My response to the music had reminded me that concealed inside myself was a more excitable and open self raring to get out.’