Introduction The Belarus Free Theatre announced itself seven years ago by email. Along with a...
The Belarus Free Theatre announced itself seven years ago by email. Along with a few other playwrights, I received a letter asking for ‘a message of support’. It didn’t seem much to ask. So after further exchanges of messages I went to Minsk to meet the group. Nikolai (Kolia) Khalezin and Nata…
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘Bolshevism, like most millenarian movements, proved a one-generation phenomenon.’
Yuri Slezkine on Soviet history and the generational arc of revolution.
‘Into the carrot-coloured bag, alongside my clothes, I put the box with Mama’s urn.’
An excerpt from Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter.
Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to human rights organisation Memorial.
‘As every soldier and every journalist who has ever covered a war knows – sleeping and eating are the most important things.’
Lindsey Hilsum writes home from Ukraine.
‘While Fateha is fleeing westward with her children, another woman is trying to save herself from the city on the shore of the Sea of Azov.’
Memoir by Sana Valiulina, translated by Polly Gannon.
‘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.’
