Photograph by CalHumanities
Rebecca Solnit discusses interweaving personal narratives with the lives of Mary Shelley and Che Guevara, paradoxes and Beyoncé.
Photograph by CalHumanities
‘The issue was the first of its kind. Trust me, it said. I know what I am talking about. These young writers are the future of literature. Watch. History will prove me right.’ – Bill Buford, Granta editor (1979-95)
‘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.’
Fiction by Kamila Shamsie from the 2013 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed – it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
Fiction by Sarah Waters from the 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.’
Fiction by A.L. Kennedy from the 1993 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
Fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro from the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
Rebecca Solnit is author of, among other books, Call Them By Their True Names, The Mother of All Questions, Men Explain Things to Me, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the NBCC award-winning River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. A contributing editor to Harper's, she writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.
More about the author →Yuka Igarashi is the former managing editor at Granta and was issue editor of Granta 127: Japan. She has taught fiction writing at various universities including Columbia and Parsons The New School for Design in New York.
More about the author →‘It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge.’
‘Renaissance gives back, by reminding Black queer people what it’s like to be in our most sacred spaces.’
Okechukwu Nzelu on Beyoncé.
‘A few years ago, while in between jobs, I started doing astrology readings for cash.’
Anna Dorn on her astrology journey.
‘What does it say about capitalism that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?’
Eula Biss on her book Having and Being Had.
‘Empires fall like milk teeth.’
Stephanie Sy-Quia on her collection Amnion.
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