Photograph © The Guardian
Granta Best of Young British novelist Kamila Shamsie talks to John Freeman about love, war and citizenship.
Photograph © The Guardian
‘The flirtations of insects and plants are furtive, hidden and often so brief that if you literally blink you might miss what exactly is going on.’
Dino J. Martins on moths and orchids, from Granta 153: Second Nature.
‘The origin of the dysfunctional family: spores. / Friend or foe? True fern or ally?’
Poems by Sylvia Legris, author of Garden Physic.
‘And the trees were safely tucked in. Their roots were rallying in the soil, in this coil. Would the woman also take a turn for the better in her last decade?’
Three stories by Diane Williams.
‘walking alone down a country road – / distracted by the slightly annoying and toxic / first green of spring, eyes overflowing’
A poem by Emily Skillings.
‘Whatever the aftermath, you won’t see the city again except through the agency of absence, recalling this semi-emptiness, this viral uncertainty.’
From 2020: China Miéville on the UK government’s response to coronavirus.
Kamila Shamsie is the author of seven novels and one book of non-fiction. The first, In the City by the Sea was published by Granta Books in 1998 and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Burnt Shadows was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and translated into more than twenty languages. She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a trustee of English PEN and a member of the Authors Cricket Club.
More about the author →‘There’s a certain adrenaline rush that comes from not knowing.’ Kamila Shamsie on writing the unsaid, the challenges of adapting Antigone and the role of the novel in politics.
PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer – we stand in solidarity with writers who have suffered persecution exercising their freedom of expression.
‘Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas.’
‘Fundamentalist mangoes must have more texture; secular mangoes should have artificial flavouring.’
‘In our grandmother’s generation, when people became more religious, they turned devout. Now they turn fundamentalist.’
‘The lemon shark / who returns to the same mangrove-lined shallows / every year to give birth.’
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