An interview with Tahmima Anam, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.
‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Tahmima Anam is the author of the Bengal Trilogy, which chronicles three generations of the Haque family from the Bangladesh war of independence to the present day. Her debut novel, A Golden Age, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. It was followed in 2011 by The Good Muslim. The final instalment in the trilogy, Shipbreaker, was published in 2014 by Canongate in the UK and HarperCollins in the US. She lives in Hackney, east London, with her husband, the musician and inventor Roland Lamb.
More about the author →Saskia Vogel is an author and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Permission, her debut novel, about love, loss and BDSM, was published in four languages in 2019. She has translated leading Swedish authors such as Lina Wolff, Karolina Ramqvist, Johannes Anyuru, and Katrine Marcal, whose Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? is published by Portobello Books. Her translations and writing have appeared in publications such as Guernica, the White Review, the Offing, Paris Review Daily, LitHub and Two Lines. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine’s publicist.
Photograph © Fette Sans
‘Two ways a man can go here, in the direction of God or the direction of believing there is nothing up there but a sun that will kill you whether you pray five times or not.’
Tahmima Anam shares a playlist of songs to write to.
‘If I had known it would put a continent between me and my children I would have killed that map-maker myself.’
‘In a sense, we had been waiting for the Ripper to visit for months, even years.’
‘When people would ask me what I was doing in Istanbul, I would explain that I’m a freelance writer and translator, and I move a lot. I move intuitively, I would say: places call to me.’
The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. For reprint enquiries, contact us.