‘He was desperate for the photograph to cease to exist: as if the man in the photo and he are competing for the same oxygen.’
One day in August 2003, I heard that Qutubuddin Ansari was moving to Calcutta. This man, whose photograph had been reproduced a thousand times in newspapers and magazines, had, reluctantly, become a national figure. He was a tailor. In the photograph, now as famous in its way as the picture of the n…
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‘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.
‘Never, long as I live, will I forget the few days I had spent with the Millers.’ Buddhadeva Bose on his friendship with Henry Miller.
‘A scene in which nothing is ostensibly happening will absorb me; so will a paragraph that contains no vital piece of information.’
‘Nobody wanted to hear / about the rain or its father / or leviathan slicing the deeps / at the black edge of the world / under the cold blue light of the Pleiades.’
