Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

The Crack in the Door

Maria Chaudhuri

‘When my mother practises music, the world is her enemy.’

The Second Night is Ending

Mikail Eldin

‘This winter and this forest will leave you with a shiver in your heart, which will appear whenever you see a winter forest, even in pictures.’

Ninth and Race

Dan Burt

‘Prostitution, gambling, fencing, contract murder, loan-sharking, political corruption and crime of every sort were the daily trade in Philadelphia’s Tenderloin, the oldest part of town.’

This July

Wiam El-Tamami

‘It felt as though time would fall off a cliff on Sunday. We jokingly called it The End of the World.’

World War II Has Never Ended

Michael W. Clune

‘I discovered Hitler the summer I turned twelve. I found him in the centre of a map in a computer game called Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. I destroyed him with a bomb.’

You Remember the Planes

Paul Auster

‘You can’t remember the precise moment when you understood that you were a Jew.’

Héctor Abad | First Sentence

Héctor Abad

‘Ever since this happened to me, I haven’t really believed in free will.’

Cristhiano Aguiar | On Tour

Cristhiano Aguiar

‘Rabbits running across a campus and a beer named Hobgoblin: these are two of the topics noted in my small travel notebook.’

A Rationalist in the Jungle

Héctor Abad

‘A pale-faced, near-sighted urbanite like me is nothing less than handicapped in the heart of the jungle.’

Water Has No Enemy

Teju Cole

‘The city is a sea that can swallow you at any time, a monster that can lash out without warning, a hell of variables and uncertainties.’

Wudang Mountain

Catherine Chung

‘The danger with chasing fantasies is that the reality is often so different than the imagination.’

War Letters

António Lobo Antunes

‘I’m doing my best to survive all this, but sometimes I feel so homesick that words simply empty of meaning.’

Inner City

Lauren Beukes

‘It has taken this to make me realize that de-humanizing is not only something that other people do to you. It can be self-inflicted too.’

Naomi Alderman | My Writing Playlist

Naomi Alderman

Naomi Alderman shares five songs she loves to write to.