Granta

Doubting Thomas | Grace Byron | Granta ‘As kids raised in the church, were supposed to be content to live in a world of answers, all neatly laid out in hymnals and Vacation Bible School.’ Grace Byron on faith, rebellion and asking…

‘The question mark has a bad reputation. It’s unruly, a rebel feeding on chaos.’ 

Grace Byron on faith, doubt and teenage rebellion. 

granta.com/doubting-tho...

Doubting Thomas | Grace Byron | Granta ‘As kids raised in the church, were supposed to be content to live in a world of answers, all neatly laid out in hymnals and Vacation Bible School.’ Grace Byron on faith, rebellion and asking…

‘In the Evangelical church we were supposed to accept the answers we were given as final. Questions and doubts were met hesitantly, like youthful rebellion.’

Grace Byron on embracing questions. 

granta.com/doubting-tho...

Appropriation | Tanuj Solanki |Granta ‘Weren’t Jyoti’s long run-on sentences also a way to show off, an exercise in breathlessness and nothing else?’ Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

‘These were fraught times, and not just because of the virus. The most pressing question for Indian writers – whose stories should we tell? – was burning blazingly.’

Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

granta.com/appropriation/

Appropriation | Tanuj Solanki |Granta ‘Weren’t Jyoti’s long run-on sentences also a way to show off, an exercise in breathlessness and nothing else?’ Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

‘There were pleasantries. There were commiserations for the state of the nation. There was solidarity. There was gossip, too, as much as a shared abhorrence of other, more successful writers can provide.’

Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

granta.com/appropriation/

Connecting the Dots | Madeline Cash | Granta ‘There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. “OK . . .” “Thanks . . .” “See you next week . . .”’

‘My mother’s use of ellipses doesn’t reveal a pattern or convey a tone. She’ll “. . .” in good times and bad. Excited, pensive, disappointed or otherwise.’

Madeline Cash on the Boomer generation’s love of ellipses.

granta.com/connecting-t...

I used to read Granta back in my twenties. It made me really happy to read it, and I hadn’t seen it since then. So cool to find it here again.

Mark Up | Granta For an online series, Mark Up, we invited writers to tell us their thoughts on...

A Granta series on punctuation and grammar: lol's, transitive verbs, ellipses, quotation marks, line breaks, xox's... 🤗

Appropriation | Tanuj Solanki |Granta ‘Weren’t Jyoti’s long run-on sentences also a way to show off, an exercise in breathlessness and nothing else?’ Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

‘Weren’t Jyoti’s long run-on sentences also a way to show off, an exercise in breathlessness and nothing else?’

Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

granta.com/appropriation/

Connecting the Dots | Madeline Cash | Granta ‘There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. “OK . . .” “Thanks . . .” “See you next week . . .”’

‘Her ellipsis is a modernism of its own: the pause of someone caught between analog warmth and digital brevity.’

Madeline Cash on ellipses, from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to her mother’s text messages.

granta.com/connecting-t...

Reclaiming the Territory | Salman Rushdie | Granta ‘It was awful to get sued by the prime minister of India.’ Granta interviews Salman Rushdie about his dealings with the magazine, the course of Indian fiction, and his brushes with Indian politics.

‘When I was writing Victory City (2023), one of the things I was writing against was Naipaul’s portrait of the Vijayanagara empire.’

Salman Rushdie on Indian literature.

granta.com/reclaiming-t...

Appropriation | Tanuj Solanki |Granta ‘Weren’t Jyoti’s long run-on sentences also a way to show off, an exercise in breathlessness and nothing else?’ Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

‘Listening to them gave me a new understanding of their works and of fiction in general. Or of fiction in India. Or of the art of fiction in 2020. Well, something like that. The word appropriation began to ring in my head.’

Fiction by Tanuj Solanki.

granta.com/appropriation/

The Killing of a Canadian Sikh | Karan Mahajan | Granta ‘What appeared to be a single extrajudicial killing now looked like a program to eliminate Khalistani activists across North America.’ Karan Mahajan on the killing of a Canadian Sikh.

‘For these Sikhs, Punjab had become a mythical landscape.’

Karan Mahajan on Sikh diaspora and the Khalistani movement.

granta.com/the-killing-...

A Measure of Martyrdom | Vivek Shanbhag | Granta ‘I didn’t mention Shami to my wife, I am not sure why. Maybe, deep down, I wanted to keep her a secret.’ Fiction by Vivek Shanbhag translated by Srinath Perur.

‘I didn’t mention Shami to my wife, I am not sure why. Maybe, deep down, I wanted to keep her a secret.’ 

Fiction by Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur.

granta.com/a-measure-fo...

Connecting the Dots | Madeline Cash | Granta ‘There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. “OK . . .” “Thanks . . .” “See you next week . . .”’

‘A seasoned texter knows that colloquially the dot-dot-dot is a cliffhanger and its receiver should heed the punctuation accordingly.’

Madeline Cash interprets the modern ellipses.

granta.com/connecting-t...

All at Once | Geetanjali Shree | Granta ‘On the surface, everything had continued as it always had, so why would it occur to anyone to pay any special attention?’

‘How easy it was to come back and give the daughter a father and the father a daughter, when she was small and he was big.’ 

Fiction by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell.

granta.com/all-at-once/

Come Rain, Come Down | Yash Sheth & Ruchir Joshi | Granta ‘It feels as though Bombay has invented rain for itself.’ Yash Sheth’s photography from Mumbais monsoon season, introduced by Ruchir Joshi.

‘The downpour across those two days in July caused the deaths of around a thousand people. In September, millions were still terrified at the sight of the smallest raincloud.’

Yash Sheth’s photography from Mumbai’s monsoon season, introduced by Ruchir Joshi.

Transformations | Umesh Solanki | Granta ‘I never felt like going to Jivo’s house. I used to think, “A Bhangya’s house, the house of the lowest of untouchables, is dirty.”’Fiction by Umesh Solanki, translated by Gopika Jadeja.

‘We began to take turns playing this game. Vikram would repeat the dialogue from the film and we’d let go of the rail for a moment, one after the other.’

Fiction by Umesh Solanki, translated by Gopika Jadeja.

granta.com/transformati...

The latest episode of the Granta podcast features Zoe Dubno, author of Happiness and Love (2025).

We discuss the New York art scene, her novel and its relationship with Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, and the differences between homage and appropriation.

Connecting the Dots | Madeline Cash | Granta ‘There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. “OK . . .” “Thanks . . .” “See you next week . . .”’

‘There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. “OK . . .” “Thanks . . .” “See you next week . . .”’

Madeline Cash decodes the Boomer ellipses.

granta.com/connecting-t...

Flesh | David Szalay | Granta ‘A moment later he’s aware of the wetness inside his trousers, and then the smell of it. It feels like a disaster, what’s happened.’ Fiction by David Szalay

Congratulations to David Szalay, whose novel ‘Flesh’ won the 2025 Booker Prize.

An excerpt of ‘Flesh’ is available to read here.

granta.com/flesh/

Reclaiming the Territory | Salman Rushdie | Granta ‘It was awful to get sued by the prime minister of India.’ Granta interviews Salman Rushdie about his dealings with the magazine, the course of Indian fiction, and his brushes with Indian politics.

‘I think young writers starting out in India now might not feel what I felt, which is that I couldn’t actually start out there.’ 

Salman Rushdie on the evolution of Indian literature.

granta.com/reclaiming-t...

A Measure of Martyrdom | Vivek Shanbhag | Granta ‘I didn’t mention Shami to my wife, I am not sure why. Maybe, deep down, I wanted to keep her a secret.’ Fiction by Vivek Shanbhag translated by Srinath Perur.

‘She wanted to be seen as someone who was precocious, and was trying, perhaps without her own knowledge, to convey this to me.’

Fiction by Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur.

granta.com/a-measure-fo...

Connecting the Dots | Madeline Cash | Granta ‘There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. “OK . . .” “Thanks . . .” “See you next week . . .”’

‘I’ve always accepted my mother’s overuse of ellipses as an idiosyncrasy of an elderly texter. But she doesn’t reserve the ‘. . .’ for ominous messages.’

Madeline Cash on texting, technology and misunderstandings.

granta.com/connecting-t...

Rejecting nostalgic accounts of the nation-state in postcolonial India, our essay of the week foregrounds the contradictions in elite formation, English’s ambivalent role, and the legacy of Marxist and subaltern thought.

With Sanjay Subrahmanyam in @grantamag.bsky.social

buff.ly/d6UkGMa

The Killing of a Canadian Sikh | Karan Mahajan | Granta ‘What appeared to be a single extrajudicial killing now looked like a program to eliminate Khalistani activists across North America.’ Karan Mahajan on the killing of a Canadian Sikh.

‘What appeared to be a single extrajudicial killing now looked like a program to eliminate Khalistani activists across North America.’

Karan Mahajan on the killing of a Canadian Sikh.

granta.com/the-killing-...

Indian Temptations ‘I understand that there is a temptation to bring everything in India, whether it’s literature, music or art, around to its relationship to nationalism. But as my friends in the art world have always ...

I always enjoy reading Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and this interview on modern Indians' fraught relationship with liberalism, history, and nationalism is a good one.

granta.com/indian-tempt...

Indian Temptations ‘I understand that there is a temptation to bring everything in India, whether it’s literature, music or art, around to its relationship to nationalism. But as my friends in the art world have always ...

Some zingers but more insights in this Granta interview of historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam 🗃️

Flesh | David Szalay | Granta ‘A moment later he’s aware of the wetness inside his trousers, and then the smell of it. It feels like a disaster, what’s happened.’ Fiction by David Szalay

Congratulations to David Szalay, whose novel ‘Flesh’ won the 2025 Booker Prize.

An excerpt of ‘Flesh’ is available to read here.

granta.com/flesh/

Reclaiming the Territory ‘It was awful to get sued by the prime minister of India.’ Granta interviews Salman Rushdie about his dealings with the magazine, the course of Indian fiction, and his brushes with Indian politics.

A terrific interview with Salman Rushdie about his history with Granta. Bill Buford published the first chapter of 'Midnight's Children' in the magazine before the book was out and without Rushdie even knowing. granta.com/reclaiming-t...

Flesh ‘A moment later he’s aware of the wetness inside his trousers, and then the smell of it. It feels like a disaster, what’s happened.’ Fiction by David Szalay

Flesh really is a superb novel; if you'd like a taster, this is an excerpt published in Granta earlier this year - not exactly the same as the passage in the book, but very much gives the flavour (and also contains a huge, crippling OOF at the end) granta.com/flesh/