Explore Essays and memoir
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Granta in Bulgaria
Ilija Troyanow
‘Leafing through old issues is like marvelling at the showroom of a renowned jeweller.’
Look East, Look to the Future
Tash Aw
‘It was as if he was consciously trying to fashion an image for what he wanted the country to be: ultra-confident and unapologetic, not just severing all links with our colonial past but sticking a bold middle finger up to it while we strode chest-out into the future.’
Fragments of a Nation
Nadifa Mohamed
‘I became English by osmosis; a new sense of humour, altered manners, an alternative history filtering through my old skin.’
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.’
Poetry in Britain
Gillian Clarke
‘Poetry must always find new ways to sing, must be fresh, must surprise, must take us by the heart with its song, its imagery, its syntax. But it can still be simple, grammatical, and speak plain English.’
Poets, Politics and Coca Tea
Valerie Miles
‘Poetry can grab you unawares, overwhelm you. The tears came like a hard rain falling.’
Stevenage
Gary Younge
‘In 1988 my mother took the bus to Stevenage town centre to do the weekly shop, came home and died in her sleep.’
Silt
Robert Macfarlane
‘This is the Broomway, allegedly ‘the deadliest’ path in Britain and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked.’
Downton Delirium
Francine Prose
‘Anglophilia is constantly thrumming on, or just under, the surface of our culture.’
That Whole London Thing
A.L. Kennedy
‘But London has always been impossible and yet possible and has always called me.’
Dividing the Kingdom
Pico Iyer
‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’
