Photograph by Charlie Hopkinson
Rachel Seiffert reads her work and talks to Granta about writing silences, the inescapability of history, the Troubles and learning to love her characters.
Photograph by Charlie Hopkinson
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Born in Oxford in 1971, Rachel Seiffert divides her time between teaching and writing. She is the author of several novels, including Afterwards and The Dark Room, shortlisted for the 2001 Man Booker Prize. She was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003.
More about the author →Yuka Igarashi is the former managing editor at Granta and was issue editor of Granta 127: Japan. She has taught fiction writing at various universities including Columbia and Parsons The New School for Design in New York.
More about the author →‘So, to summarise: witty, bold, and delicate too. Oh yes, and supremely able to turn a story.’
‘Dark red hair. Wee skirt and trainers, bare arms. All those freckles.’
‘A story that starts with a bereavement: already I’m drawn in.’
‘The bushes grow dense across the top of the drop, but Martin can just see through the leaves: young mother and son, swimming in the pool hollowed out by the waterfall.’
‘Thanks to what Chetan had published, he and his parents were in trouble, and he was exiled from India.’
Fiction by Karan Mahajan.
‘When the governor forbade Havel to write essays, ordering him to write only about himself, he started a series on his fifteen different moods.’
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