Sandra Newman & Lucy Diver

‘While you’re still arguing you still have hope.’

Jonathan Levi

‘It’s a miracle that Granta survived our mutual adolescence. And yet, it was that smell of teenage spirit that brought Graham Greene and Martha Gellhorn and Hanif Kureishi to our pages.’

Jessica Francis Kane

‘On 8 January 2018, I noticed a large bunch of purple balloons in a tree near my apartment building.’

Lauren Aimee Curtis

‘There she is: Dolores. Newly named. Sitting at the kitchen table inside the convent, conscious of how bad she must smell.’

Joanna Kavenna

An excerpt from ZED, the forthcoming novel by Joanna Kavenna, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.

Mbozi Haimbe

‘The sister has a headful of fine hair down to the small of her back. The golden colour of maize silk, her weave is not stiff and waxy like Chipo’s, but moves in the breeze.’

Hannah Williams

‘Despite the sheer and uncommunicable amount of violence enacted upon the female body throughout history, it’s woman as terroriser, as beast, that we keep coming back to.’

Kevin Barry

‘Maurice turns left, turns right, to loosen out the kinks in his neck. Images slice through him.’

Justin Torres

Pallavi Aiyar & Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

‘There’s a lot I’ve written to you that I’ve never said to anyone else before simply because of how much you and I share.’

David Harrison

Whatever we make ugly, nature will correct.

Joanna Pocock

‘How could having sex with the Earth ever be consensual?’

Fatima Farheen Mirza

Fatima Farheen Mirza on navigating gender roles in a Muslim family, wearing hijab and learning how to box.

Constantia Soteriou

Constantia Soteriou’s ‘Death Customs’, translated from the Greek by Lina Protopapa, is the regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2018 for Canada and Europe.

Ben Pester

A trip on a commuter train takes a surreal turn in new fiction by Ben Pester.

James Tate

‘I wanted to go for a walk, but I was afraid / of missing a phone call.’

Caroline Crampton

‘Alone in the silent dark, she traversed the mouth of the estuary in mile-long sweeps, making a little more progress up the river each time she turned. Wind and tide were pushing her away, back towards the sea.’

Saraswathy M. Manickam

Saraswathy M. Manickam’s ‘My Mother Pattu’ is the Asian regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Robert Coover

Robert Coover envisions a Trumpian Hulk for a modern America.

Katherine Angel

‘We need to keep the modern, civilised father on the hook.’

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey remembers Binyavanga Wainaina.

Harley Hern

Harley Hern’s ‘Screaming’ is the Pacific regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Robert Chandler

‘Nothing made her happier than to sacrifice herself for her son’s happiness.’

Gerald Murnane

‘He had forgotten in the seminary how many distractions there were in the world.’

Merritt Tierce

‘Once you learn to seal the shell, to make it watertight, you can let anything roil around in there.’

Amanda Lee Koe

‘In the day, his bevy of besotted rustics were coached in maxims of libertarian socialism. By night: rice wine orgies and folk punk sing-alongs.’

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.

Sigrid Rausing

Granta’s editor Sigrid Rausing remembers Binyavanga Wainaina.

Anne Serre

Anne Serre on how she writes. Translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.

Mark Waldron

‘Just look at those nasty trees flaunt / their leaves, each one a tra-la-la.’

Zanele Muholi & Anne McNeill

‘Zanele Muholi is a photographer, often described as one of the most powerful visual activists of our time, and a long-time advocate for their black LGBTQ+ community.’

Lucy Ives

‘The bro has a pair of plump dogs over which he deploys nauseating quantities of ketchup.’

Lucy Ives & Niina Pollari

‘For me, narratives are always tied to and emerging from other narratives; there is no single beginning, no origin.’

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.

Jessica Francis Kane

‘It wasn’t until the end of dinner, when my aunt started clearing and my grandmother demanded another bottle of wine, that I began to understand.’

Noor Naga

‘Question: is romance just a father who never carried you to bed carrying you, at last, to bed?’