An interview with Tahmima Anam, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.
‘I alone know a running stream
that is recovery partly and dim sweat
of a day-fever’
A poem by Rowan Evans.
‘Humour is a thread we hang onto. It punctures through the fog of guilt.’
Momtaza Mehri in conversation with Warsan Shire.
‘Something shifted in me that night. A small voice in my head said, maybe you can make a way for yourself as a poet here, too.’
Mary Jean Chan in conversation with Andrew McMillan.
‘There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’
An essay by Jason Allen-Paisant from Granta 159: What Do You See?
‘I have started to see that nothing is itself’
A poem by Jason Allen-Paisant from Granta 154: I’ve Been Away for a While.
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 a writer and translator from Los Angeles, now living in Berlin. Her debut novel Permission was published in five languages. The Swedish edition was translated by Johanne Lykke Holm. Vogel has translated over twenty fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles from Swedish into English, including works by Linnea Axelsson, Johanne Lykke Holm, Balsam Karam, Karolina Ramqvist, Steve Sem-Sandberg, Lina Wolff and Jessica Schiefauer, whose Girls Lost was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Her translation of Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears won the Firecracker Award for fiction. Vogel’s writing has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and longlisted for the Believer Book Award and the Pushcart Prize. She was Princeton University’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence. You can read her work in the New Yorker, LitHub, the New York Times, the White Review, the Offing, Elsewhere and elsewhere. Photograph © Fette Sans
More about the author →‘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.’
‘A sudden rustling in your chest. A premonition of understanding.’
Fiction by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Asa Yoneda.
Three months this man’s been off the farm – go back now, back to diesel,...
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