Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

Writing Like Degas Paints

Sulaiman Addonia

Sulaiman Addonia on how Edgar Degas’s nude portraits inspired his latest novel, Silence Is My Mother Tongue.

Lucia Berlin Writes Home

Nina Ellis

Nina Ellis on the life and writing of Lucia Berlin. ‘If Berlin's collections were houses, their hallways would change direction without warning, and their rooms would be bright and dark at the same time.’

Breasts: A History

Krys Malcolm Belc

‘My breasts are shrinking. As my fat redistributes it settles in my belly and leaves my chest.’

Of Donuts I Have Loved

Miranda Dennis

‘Krispy Kremes melt at the touch, are tender and loving, are used by my family to perform a wholeness we do not always feel’

A Few Words about Fake Breasts

Nell Boeschenstein

‘You repeat this over and over. You pinch your nipples harder. Then harder and harder still. You twist them. You dare them to say Mercy. You stare into your own eyes that are watching you from the mirror.’

A Summer of Japanese Literature

Dan Bradley

From manga to crime fiction, contemporary literature to Nobel-Prize-winning classics, here are ten works of Japanese literature worth spending your summer on

I Bite My Friends

Fernanda Eberstadt

‘The Easter Parade is winding down, when I spot Him. Her. Them. The Apparition.’

Telling My Story

Stella Duffy

‘I wonder if they could all smell the queer on me, the queer in me, the burgeoning sexuality that I had no words for at the time.’

What Do Women Want?

Devorah Baum

‘What we’re arguing about turns out to be how to speak to each other at all.’

The Editor’s Chair: On Christine Montalbetti

Alex Andriesse

‘For Montalbetti to have achieved this syntactic ease in French is a feat. For the translator to reproduce it in English requires the capacities of a medium.’

since feeling is first

Nuar Alsadir

‘The way we manage erotic knowledge is connected to our handling of unwanted truths’

Ways of Looking

Lulah Ellender

‘He is like a mantling hawk, his heft and body spreading over his prey as he tears off pieces of her with his eyes.’ Lulah Ellender on the male gaze.

Karl Kraus and Veza

Elias Canetti

‘It was natural that the rumors about both these people should reach me at the same time; they came from the same source, from which everything new for me came at that time.’

Carys Davies | Notes on Craft

Carys Davies

‘All good stories are both resonant and concrete; they live in the mind of the reader and reverberate beyond the pages of the book.’