Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

The Fog and the Sea

Lily Dunn

Lily Dunn on her father’s losing battle with alcoholism.

All that Offers a Happy Ending Is a Fairy Tale

Yiyun Li

‘If you were like me, you would know the obsession of the compulsive reader: every street sign; every bottle label’

Labyrinth of the Heart

Mark Slouka

‘Every marriage is forged differently; some crack at a touch, others endure beyond belief, still others are tempered by events and time.’

He Had His Reasons

Colin Barrett

Colin Barrett on the Hawe family murder-suicide, and what the Irish media’s coverage tells us about the nation’s prejudices.

Travels in Pornland

Andrea Stuart

‘I can easily recall my first brush with porn’

Brexit Win

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

‘The poor hated the poor, natives hated outsiders, settled migrants hated new incomers, the North hated the South, non-Londoners hated London.’

Our Shining Castle

Julia Rochester

‘Europe, for me, meant family.’

Kettle Holes

Melissa Febos

‘They knelt at my feet. They crawled naked across gleaming wooden floors.’

Crocodiles and Fairy Dust

Janice Galloway

‘I admit the sneaking feeling, just now and then, that those who govern us think we’re the problem.’

The Politics of English Forgetfulness

Madeleine Bunting

‘Brexit demonstrates one of England’s most trusted strategies of power: deliberate forgetfulness.’