Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

A Mingling | State of Mind

Siri Hustvedt

‘My empathy may become a vehicle of insight for me and therefore help me to help you or it may debilitate me altogether, make me so sad I am no good to you whatsoever.’

All That Was Familiar

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

The story of two women fleeing Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria.

Anosh Irani | Notes on Craft

Anosh Irani

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

Between Them

Richard Ford

‘It was my child’s outlook to think most things were right. And yet if life’s eternal drama is of events seeking a more perfect state, their life and mine was not that.’

Eliza Griswold | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Eliza Griswold

‘Even in its subtler forms, the act of looking is an act of self-regard.’

Ian Jack | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Ian Jack

‘Travel writing of most kinds, not just the humorous, has the history of colonialism perched on its shoulder.’

Language In Exile

Mireille Gansel

One summer’s day, for the first time, Mitzi broached the past. Past in the present, so present, with everything it had deposited in this room that suddenly seemed so vast. Everything that the grim tide deposits on the shores of a life.

Lindsey Hilsum | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Lindsey Hilsum

‘We need a new genre of travel writing, gleaned from the stories refugees and migrants.’

Mohsin Hamid | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Mohsin Hamid

‘I have come to believe that we are all migrants, that the experience of migration unites all human beings.’

Monster | State of Mind

Margo Jefferson

‘Today’s a day for you to feel blocked and impeded; a coward in work and love; resenting duty; suspecting pleasure.’

On Jesus’ Son

Eli Goldstone

‘Jesus’ Son is a song, a glorious clear hymn, full of the notes of bad decisions, of rotten fucking luck, of causing real and lasting damage to yourself and to the people around you.’

On the Road

Janine di Giovanni

‘But I still get homesick, that vast and deep pit in the stomach, every time I go away.’

Out of the Cell

Pico Iyer

‘I was inside a silence that was not an absence of noise so much as the living presence of everything I habitually walked – or sleep-walked – past.’

Pico Iyer | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Pico Iyer

‘The writer on place has to go further inward, into the realm of silence and nuance and personal enquiry.’