Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

Brandy

Philip Hensher

‘So there is music and music. It is not easy, after all.’

The Fall of Vukovar

Jean Hatzfeld

'Jean Hatzfeld returned to the former Yugoslavia and was severely wounded by gunfire in June 1992'.

House Style: Editing Brazil

Yuka Igarashi

‘We’re freaks . . . Why are we still talking about typos?’

A Sign of Weakness

Terrence Holt

‘Fast asleep, even comatose, a living body moves.’

The Tin Drum In Retrospect

Günter Grass

‘With the baggage of stored-up material, vague plans and precise ambitions - I wanted to write my novel and Anna was looking for more rigorous ballet training - we left Berlin early in 1956 and, penniless but undaunted, went to Paris.’

The Making of a Writer

Kent Haruf

‘I learned to live completely inwardly in those years.’

Physics and Bonkology

Janice Galloway

‘Sex Education, like winning the pools, was something that did not happen to us.’

Two Farms: One Black, One White

Lindsey Hilsum

‘They were both in their early forties. We drank tea on the veranda, watching the dogs play as the water sprinkler greened the lawn. This was the Africa of the white man's dream, where nature can be subdued inside the compound, but where the bush extends in its thrilling wildness just beyond the fence.’

Those Who Felt Differently

Ian Jack

‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’

On the death of Diana.

A Fight in Bethnal Green

Jeremy Harding

‘There was no sizing up, no graceful footwork, none of the rhetoric of the game: this was unmitigated invective.’

Subject+Object

Seamus Heaney

‘Birch is the tree of desire, ashimmer with sexual possibility even when it arrives swathed in botanical Latin.’

Lost Cat

Mary Gaitskill

‘Which deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and what is little?’

Introduction: India – Another Way of Seeing

Ian Jack

Ian Jack's introduction to Granta 130: India.

Xiaolu Guo | My Writing Playlist

Xiaolu Guo

‘The challenge of flowing in one continuous outpouring of language in a novel is my killer.’