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← Back to all issuesGranta 157: Should We Have Stayed at Home? New Travel Writing
Autumn 2021
In 1984, Granta published its first issue devoted to travel writing. Nearly forty years after that genre-defining volume, a new generation of writers from around the globe offers a new vision of what travel writing can be.
From Antarctica and the deserts of the US-Mexico border, to a Siberian whale-killing station and the alleyways of Taipei, these dispatches describe a world in perpetual motion (even when it is ‘locked-down’). To travel, we are reminded, is to embrace the experience of being a stranger – to acknowledge that one person’s frontier is another’s home.
Granta 157 is guest-edited by award-winning travel writer William Atkins.
Cover image by Teju Cole
From this Issue
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The Steepest Places: In the Cordillera Central
Ben Mauk
‘In the mountains, however, Duterte seemed to have met his match.’
Ben Mauk meets the mountains of Luzon.
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The Dam
Taran N. Khan
‘Invisible borders are not the same as open borders.’
Taran N. Khan on Hamburg’s Steindamm.
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Travelling Secretary
Emmanuel Iduma
‘My life unfolded within the net effect of my father’s choices.’
Memoir by Emmanuel Iduma.
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Graffiti Mobili
Jennifer Croft
‘The picture of a postcard is a geograft, a scion of a place thrust into the life of a resident of somewhere else.’
Jennifer Croft on graffiti and the history of the postcard.
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The Ninth Spring: One Day at the Kolibi
Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova visits the Osmanovi family in the southern Balkans.
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Tala Zone
Pascale Petit
‘Even when I travel as far as India, you are with me and I am re-entering our cellar.’
Memoir by the poet Pascale Petit.
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A Wider Patch of Sky
Javier Zamora & Francisco Cantú
‘We’re so much more than those things. Citizen or undocumented. Border Patrol or immigrant.’
Letters between Javier Zamora and Francisco Cantú.
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Boarding Pass
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
‘But the crime did exist; it was Cuba itself.’
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne.
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From an Untouched Landscape
James Tylor & Dominic Guerrera
‘It’s hard to find a spot where the colony hasn’t reached; the landscape is consistently interrupted.’
Dominic Guerrera introduces artwork by James Tylor.
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回 | An Alley (Return)
Jessica J. Lee
‘I had never known an alley to be so green.’
Jessica J. Lee returns to Taipei.
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Primitive Child
Jason Allen-Paisant
‘My roots seemed to be in the ocean; the ocean being symbolic of my absent father.’
Memoir by Jason Allen-Paisant.
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Confluences
Kate Harris
‘The creek was fringed with tall grass and clear as breath.’
Kate Harris in the Taku River Tlingit First Nation.
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From the Center of the World to the End of the World
Eliane Brum
‘For tourists to have this “experience”, six scientists were obliged to interrupt their research and wait until that afternoon, when the weather turned and time in the field shrank.’
Translated from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus Whitty.
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I Know What Spring Is Like: Clarice, Crônicas and Corcovado
Sinéad Gleeson
‘A state of grace, Lispector writes, should be short-lived, episodic.’
Sinéad Gleeson on Clarice Lispector’s Brazil.
