Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

On High Heels and Lotus Feet

Summer Brennan

Summer Brennan on high heels, foot-binding, and our ongoing performances of gender.

A Night in the Engadine

John Kaag

John Kaag, author of Hiking with Nietzsche, camps out in the mountains of the Engadine where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Dinah

Barbara Smith

Barbara Smith remembers her friend and cousin, Diana Athill.

10 Schools of Philosophy that should be better known (in the West)

Julian Baggini

The author of How The World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy explains ten of the most overlooked philosophies from around the world.

Martin Goodman | Notes on Craft

Martin Goodman

Martin Goodman on why it took him twenty years to write his latest novel, J SS Bach.

The Nine Circles

Margo Rejmer

‘The body wants to escape suffering at all costs. The body wants to live.’

Introduction

Devorah Baum & Josh Appignanesi

‘Troubling though they may be, feelings also tell us something about power and its limitations.’

Touch

Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

‘Touch had its own language, and the rules were the opposite of the ones I knew at home.’

Lazy Boy

Josh Cohen

‘I don’t see him staring back at me from the La-Z-Boy, I see me, I see a crystalline image of my own burned-out soul’

Distilling Existence: A Study with Wilson Amunga

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor & Bernd Hartung

‘If the river makes a sound now, it is a drawn-out moan.’ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor on distilleries in Kenya, with photographs by Bernd Hartung.

The Guests

Hisham Matar

‘Strangely, it was Joseph Conrad who introduced me to Edward Said and not the other way around.’

Feeling Southern: A Patagonian Story

Fabián Martínez Siccardi

‘I was harbouring a southern feeling, a deep connection with the South of this real world, where I was born and will probably die.’

#TeamBaddiel vs #TeamBabel

David Baddiel

‘Social media has allowed everyone in the world to raise their own little flag of self’

The Tension of Transience

Chloe Aridjis

‘How unusual that April night had been, yet how normal it had seemed at the time’