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← Back to all issuesGranta 154: I’ve Been Away for a While
Winter 2021
‘Perhaps in isolation a new form of communication is emerging, expressing what readers and writers have always told one another, via books and letters and on the literary stage: I hear you. You are not alone.’
– Sigrid Rausing, Editor of Granta
Cover image: © Tom Hammick, Vergissmeinnicht, 2019
From this Issue
Essays & Memoir|Granta 154
Essays & Memoir|Granta 154
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘Perhaps in isolation a new form of communication is emerging, expressing what readers and writers have always told one another, via books and letters and on the literary stage: I hear you. You are not alone.’
Fiction|Granta 154
Fiction|Granta 154
Permafrost
Eva Baltasar
‘This never made sense to Roxanne, whose whole life was a treat.’
Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches.
Fiction|Granta 154
Fiction|Granta 154
I’ve Been Away for a While
Dan Shurley
‘When the world releases him from its oily grip will there still be a world?’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 154
Essays & Memoir|Granta 154
The Stinky Ocean
Ian Jack
‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
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In Bright Light
Paul Dalla Rosa
‘The hard thing, as Alice saw it, was that something bad had happened to her and it was private and then it wasn’t.’
Poetry|Granta 154
Poetry|Granta 154
In Medias Res
Jesse Darling
‘I walk the broken line like I once walked into the bar’
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Colville
Fergus Thomas & Duane Hall
‘You can really feel the horses, when you’re around them, you can feel their spirit coming to life.’
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When the Cholera Came
Lindsey Hilsum
‘It was hard not to wonder if the disease was a kind of divine retribution – collective punishment for a collective crime.’
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Victim and Accused
Vidyan Ravinthiran
‘I’m curious about the refusal to countenance a connection between disparate experiences – a route by which empathy could travel.’
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The Scarecrow
Diaa Jubaili & Chip Rossetti
‘Just at the time of the ceasefire between Iraq and Iran in 1988, an infantry platoon discovered that they were in a minefield.’
Translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti.
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Abbandonati
Rory Gleeson
‘One day, 200 people’s X-rays showed they needed intensive care in order to survive.’
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On a Farm near Junction City
Nate Duke
‘broiled thoughts / cool in labor’s mute thrum’
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Al-Birr Islamic Trust Morgue, Greenwich Islamic Centre, April 2020
Gus Palmer & Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
‘Palmer’s portraits of Kafil Ahmed sit alongside those of other people risking their lives to take care of others.’
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My Phantoms
Gwendoline Riley
‘I’m not sure I even thought of him as a person, really. He was more just this – phenomenon.’
The Online Edition
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
On ‘Colville’
Natalie Diaz
The author of Postcolonial Love Poem on ‘Colville’, the photoessay by Fergus Thomas.