Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

Saved to ‘Drafts’

ZZ Packer

‘I know you’ll make the right choice; even if you don’t, you’re still beloved family.’

Letters to My Father, Now Dead

Teresa Pàmies

‘I was glad to see General Pavel at your funeral, Father.’

Famous People

Orhan Pamuk

‘Life is dull if there's no story to listen to or nothing to watch’.

Orhan Pamuk | On Europe

Orhan Pamuk

‘In the part of the world where I come from, Europe is not just an ideal and a beautiful dream’ Translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap.

The Boy Who Watched the Ships Go By

Orhan Pamuk

‘For the last thirty years I've been keeping track of the ships that sail through the Bosporus.’

Scarp | New Voices

Nick Papadimitriou

‘His imagination lingers in the woods and fields like a slowly drifting plant community and then dissolves into ditches lined with black waterlogged leaves – a residue of previous summers – and the ghosts of dead insects.’

What the Germans Left Behind

Anna Parker

‘My Czech family’s house stands on a geopolitical rift: it occupies a place the political storms sweep through, uprooting everything that is settled.’

An essay by Anna Parker.

Obedience

Ian Parker

‘Just how far would a person go under the experimenter’s orders?’

Ants of Accra

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

‘Ants became an obsession with her – she darted with them as they changed paths, watched them find their way around obstacles placed in their way.’

Trenitalia

Tim Parks

‘It was explained to me that in Italy a formality is a sort of dormant volcano.’

Paolo

Tim Parks

‘My last glimpse of Paolo was on the platform at Verona station when I pointed him out to the police.’

Boys, Barricades, Beaches

Jack Parlett

On the queer history of New York’s Fire Island.

What Young Men Do

Richard Lloyd Parry

‘Everyone I met in West Kalimantan had tales of Dayak magic’.