Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

Free will and Brexit

Julian Baggini

‘Whether or not you think 23 June was a great day for Britain and Europe, it was a very bad one for freedom.’

Black Country

Anthony Cartwright

‘There’s a sense, I think, that what that X in the box translates as is seventeen and a half million voices that say, we’re still here.’

Diaries

Suzanne Brøgger

‘My habit of being a dreamer is filled with the joy of melancholy.’

Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men

Pwaangulongii Dauod

‘The night was full of energy. The kind of energy that Africa needs to reinvent itself.’

The Decay of Politics

Philip Ó Ceallaigh

‘Britain has made the control of borders and the free movement of people its central obsession, its fundamental national anxiety.’ Philip Ó Ceallaigh on Brexit.

Before They Began to Shrink

Nic Dunlop

‘The numbers killed at Aughrim that day will never be known.’

Cracking Up

Kevin Breathnach

‘It has been several weeks since I slept for more than an hour, and lately I’ve been feeling on the verge of cracking up.’

The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion

Kevin Barry

‘If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place. Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.’

On Sonnet 50

Paula Bohince

‘I love Shakespeare’s slow insistence, which mirrors the action within the poem: there is nothing but grief to reach.’ Paula Bohince on Shakespeare’s sonnet 50.

Crossings

Tim Beckett

‘This was the collective trauma of a community discovering, very abruptly, they’d have to uproot their lives.’ Tim Beckett on the ruins of Uranium City.

Violence in Blue

Patrick Ball

‘One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.’

Five Things Right Now: Diane Cook

Diane Cook

Diane Cook shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.