‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
One afternoon in the autumn of 1933 the writer J. B. Priestley drove north from Manchester towards Preston and Blackpool. Priestley was then England’s most successful young novelist. Not yet forty, with five novels and the international success of The Good Companions behind him, he had decided as …
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‘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.
‘Feelings of hate and despair dwindle as they pass down the generations.’
‘Generalisations about the national psyche – supposing there is one – must always be treated with suspicion.’
‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
Read the title story from AM Homes' dazzling new collection of short stories, Days of Awe, available now from Granta Books.
