Helen Oyeyemi speaks to Ted Hodgkinson about the joys of writing from a male perspective, magic in her work, and how as a girl she wrote alternate endings to the classics.
Best of Young British Novelist Helen Oyeyemi speaks to Ted Hodgkinson about the joys of writing from a male perspective, the role of magic in her work, some of her influences from Alfred Hitchcock to Jeanette Winterson and how as a young girl she would write alternate endings in the margins of the classics.
Photograph © Nadav Kander
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘A golden chain was fastened around her neck, and on that chain was a key.’
‘I didn’t enclose a note, though there were a few things I’d have liked to say. Restraint is classier.’
Colin Robinson reads from his memoir ‘Paddleball’ in Granta 122: Betrayal and talks to Ted Hodgkinson about how an old brotherly friction re-emerged during a game in New York, and how gym culture has changed the way we view our bodies.
Jeet Thayil talked to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about being shortlisted for the Booker, the images of Christ woven into his novel Narcopolis and an unexpected digression on Blade Runner.
‘These are stories that capture sudden, unexpected intimacies and unearth alternate family mythologies in seemingly innocuous objects.’
Cynan Jones spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why he doesn’t want to be defined as a Welsh writer, the pleasures and challenges of writing short stories and novellas and writing about the growing pains of adolescence.
