Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

The Secret Afterlife of Boats

Anna Badkhen

‘The sea is broken,’ they say. An empty net at night: a drooping lattice of shiny nothingness, a cold and worthless tinsel mesh.

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.’

Best Book of 2001: Natural Goodness

Julian Baggini

Julian Baggini on why Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness is the best book of 2001.

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.

Anthony Bailey | A London View

Anthony Bailey

I come from a generation which still, fifty-odd years on, looks up and once in a while thinks, 'Good, one of ours.'

Funny Noises with our Mouths

Beryl Bainbridge

‘If we went out to tea in Southport and my mother left a tip under the plate, my grandmother used to pick it up and slide it into her handbag.’

La Mer

Nicholson Baker

‘I heard Debussy's side-slipping water-slopes, with cold spray blown off their crests’

Resist: A Letter from Greece

Natalie Bakopoulos

‘This June, I arrived in Athens just in time for a strike that had halted the metro from the airport to the city.’

Violence in Blue

Patrick Ball

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

The Mission

Tom Bamforth

‘It is strange, the rituals we find ourselves carrying out before the unknown.’

Lost and Found

Je Banach

‘And yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of Lamb’s influence on contemporary writing, the nineteenth-century superstar has been largely ignored and mostly forgotten.’

Little Durga

Shampa Banerjee

‘I groaned inwardly when anybody mentioned Pather Panchali and my small part in it.’

What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat

Chitrita Banerji

‘Spring in Bengal is teasing and elusive, secret yet palpable, waiting to be discovered.’

Carrot Bread

Annabel Banks

‘A short story is a loose-knit sweater, a trawler’s net, where the spaces and holes are inseparable from the whole.’