For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Taiye Selasi.
Photograph © Nadav Kander
Taiye Selasi talks about her mother’s garden, Rachmaninov and learning to speak Italian.
For more about the author, including critical perspectives and in-depth biographies, visit the British Council’s web pages on Taiye Selasi.
Photograph © Nadav Kander
‘I want the poem to destroy time. / What are the ceremonies of forgetting?’
An elegy by Nick Laird for his father, Alastair Laird, who died in 2021 of Covid-19. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
‘In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur’
From Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia, published by Granta Books and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
‘My brother and I hurried through sloppy postures of praise, quiet as the light pooling around us.’
A poem by Kaveh Akbar, from his shortlisted collection Pilgrim Bell, first published in Granta 156: Interiors.
‘I wanted to and then / Remembered why I want to never’
Poetry by Shane McCrae, shortlisted for Cain Named the Animal.
‘Would / the apple be concerned / if I said it was not an apple’
Poems by Padraig Regan, from Some Integrity, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
Taiye Selasi was born in London to Nigerian and Ghanian parents. she holds a BA from Yale and an MPhil from Oxford. Selasi made her fiction debut in Granta in 2011 with 'The Sex Live of African Girls', which was selected for Best American Short Stories in 2012. Her first novel, Ghana Must Go, was published in March 2013. An avid traveller and photographer, Selasi lives in Rome.
More about the author →‘She has the most genuine intentions of any woman out there.’
‘I am the full-time driver here. I am not going to kill my employers. I have read that drivers do that now.’
Taiye Selasi, one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, shares a playlist of songs to write to.
A selection of Granta contributors discuss the books they read in 2012.
‘I was rather surprised to discover that I’d painted such a devastating portrait.’
‘She has the most genuine intentions of any woman out there.’
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