Jim hardly sees the black and orange streamers which decorate the lobby for the costume ball, or the dish of pumpkin-seeds laid out in welcome on the table there.


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Jim hardly sees the black and orange streamers which decorate the lobby for the costume ball, or the dish of pumpkin-seeds laid out in welcome on the table there.
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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.
Adam Mars-Jones is a writer and critic living in London. His recent novel Pilcrow restored a shy typographical symbol (¶) to its proper place in the breakfast conversation of millions. He was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in both 1983 and 1993. He reviews books for the London Observer.
More about the author →‘Obscure repertoire is a sensible hiding-place for mediocre technique.’
‘At the end of the year, an ambulance brought Suseela home from hospital to die’.
‘I put my trophy on a high shelf, and at some stage laid it face down.’
‘In rapidly transforming societies, writers may lose the space they’ve built their imaginative lives around.’
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