When the phone rings, who do you most want it to be? And who would you hate it to be? Who is the first person that comes into your mind, Roy liked to ask people, at that moment?


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When the phone rings, who do you most want it to be? And who would you hate it to be? Who is the first person that comes into your mind, Roy liked to ask people, at that moment?
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘There was really no point in going to a bomb shelter just because the siren sounded. Our hotel was unlikely to be a target.’
Lindsey Hilsum writes letters home from Ukraine.
‘The recipe is a text that can produce spattering because it was spattering before it was language.’
Rebecca May Johnson on recipes, repetition and intimacy.
‘To make a subject of the very same entity I am a part of, to be outside and within it.’
Thomas Duffield photographs his family.
‘There sat the joy of the shopping centre, what I thought of as its secret heart. A white rabbit.’
A story by Dizz Tate.
‘We were ourselves migrating birds; in a sense, refugees, displaced persons, without a home or a home town.’
Volodymyr Rafeyenko (tr. Sasha Dugdale) on the war in Ukraine.
Hanif Kureishi grew up in Kent and studied philosophy at King’s College London. He was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. His novels include The Buddha of Suburbia, which won the 1990 Whitbread Award for First Novel, The Black Album, Intimacy and The Last Word. He has been appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. His next book, What Happened?, a collection of essays and stories, is published in 2019.
More about the author →‘One day at school–an all-boys comprehensive on the border between London and Kent–our music teacher told us that John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn't actually write those famous Beatles songs we loved so much.'
‘My response to the music had reminded me that concealed inside myself was a more excitable and open self raring to get out.’
‘The warmest companion with the coldest vision of where Humanity might head.’
‘If you think the living are difficult to deal with, the dead can be worse‘.
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