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Explore Essays and memoir

A Handful of Walnuts

Ahmed Errachidi & Clive Stafford Smith

‘There was no horizon, no life and nothing to see.’

A Hippy Among Communists

Klaus Schlesinger

‘In March 1975, thirty years after the collapse of German fascism, N., a student from Berlin – bearded and long-haired – attended a series of lectures at a university on the Baltic coast.’

A History

William Cooper

‘She was fighting for breath, fighting to live, perhaps fighting not to leave us.’

A Hunger

Fran Lock

Both has a way of being neither.’

An essay by Fran Lock from the anthology Queer Life, Queer Love.

A Job on the Line

Desmond Barry

‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’

A Journey into Afghanistan

Peregrine Hodson

‘We had been travelling for a week, and had reached the territory of the Hesb Nasr: a rival group of mujahedin who were notorious for ambushing travellers, stealing their weapons and skinning their victims.’

A Kept Woman

Laura Bell

‘I find myself walking the high trail between fear and love.’

A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out

Milan Kundera

‘But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.’

A Land Without Strangers

Ben Mauk

Ben Mauk on nationalism and xenophobia in Poland.

A Language of Figs

Sema Kaygusuz

Sema Kaygusuz on the inheritances of genocide and historical memory, and what her own grandmother, a survivor of the Dersim Massacre in Turkey, taught her about life and language.

A Letter

Sławomir Mrożek

‘I draw your attention to football. The practice of this game threatens the basis of our very way of life.’

A letter from Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro

The letter that accompanied Ishiguro’s first submission to Granta.

A Letter to my Sons: War’s End

Heinrich Böll

‘No, it's not easier for you than it was for us: don't let them tell you otherwise.’

A Letter to Our Son

Peter Carey

‘We talked about Alison’s blood. We asked her what she thought this mystery could be. Really what we wanted was to be told that everything was OK. There was a look on Alison's face when she asked. I cannot describe it, but it was not a face seeking medical “facts”.’