Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 135: New Irish Writing
Spring 2016
Ireland has one of the world’s most distinguished literary traditions. In this issue, we showcase contemporary Irish fiction, memoir, poetry and photography.
Special thanks to Culture Ireland and Poetry Ireland for their support.
From this Issue
|Granta 135
Out
Leontia Flynn
‘The opposite of simply sitting about / in your head, like an egg in eggshell.’
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Drama Lessons for Young Girls
Tara Bergin
‘So the young girls, / cast as naughty young girls from the Acropolis, / left – / just with some things missing.’
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My Last Day at Seventeen: Portraits from Russell Heights
Doug DuBois
Doug DuBois captures life at Russell Heights, a housing estate ‘of uncertain vintage that sits on Spy Hill above Cork harbour’.
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The Visitor
Colin Barrett
‘The dog was some sort of overbred weedling with a ribcage fine-boned as a chicken’s, a wizened rat’s face and a goony, perpetually bloodshot stare that made Dev Hendrick want to punt the thing over the garden gate.’
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Green, Mud, Gold
Sara Baume
‘She shuts her eyes and pictures ears growing out through her ears, her spine turning to wood, pictures herself as a girl-woman scarecrow, arms opened wide, and nailed to two posts in the centre of a great green, mud and gold expanse, crucified.’
|Granta 135
The Birds of June
John Connell
‘Her dreams were interrupted occasionally by the sound of the cow and her newborn calf from the outhouse sheds. A low bellow would crinkle the folds of her mind and then seconds later it would be answered from some other shed in the distance.’
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All We Shall Know
Donal Ryan
‘Thoughts sharpen themselves on the flints of one another and pierce me like a knife in my middle, sunk deep and twisted around.’
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The Travellers
Birte Kaufmann
Birte Kaufmann examines the everyday, parallel world of Irish travellers.
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A Visit to the Zoo
Colm Tóibín
‘The two chameleons in a glass case appeared to interest all of them, Heinrich thought, because of their beauty and their stillness. They looked like a pale painting.’
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The Wonder
Emma Donoghue
‘Lib didn’t like to bang harder in case of disturbing the family. Brightness leaked from the door of the byre, off to her right. Ah, the women had to be milking. A trail of melody; was one of them singing to the cows?’
|Granta 135
The Mountain Road
William Wall
‘Funeral homes are always cold. There were pine benches in lines like a church. They had been varnished recently and there was that heady smell. It reminded me of my father’s boat, the wheelhouse brightwork newly touched up. It was the smell of childhood.’
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Through the Night
Siobhán Mannion
‘The person in the mirror watches her, slightly swollen, slightly blurred.’
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Our Day Will Come: Loyalist, Republican
Stephen Dock
Stephen Dock explores a divided Belfast and reflects on the economic hardship that affects both side.
|Granta 135
Kiddio at the Wedding
Mary O’Donoghue
‘If he fell in I would jump straight after, I would plumb through water not cold so much as oily, and dark as a dirty wine bottle.’
|Granta 135
The Butcher
Stephen Sexton
‘Outside deer are nowhere to be seen and inside / the radio spectrum fills up with sorrowful little packets of data.’
