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“When you are comfortable with your own voice, you’re able to create other voices that are authentic as well.” In this short video, Derek Owusu, author most recently of Losing the Plot (Canongate Books, 2022) and one of Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists, talks about writing immigrant stories and finding your voice.
“Don’t worry about whether you’re writing anything, worry about if you’re sitting there attempting to write something or not.” In this video, Mohsin Hamid speaks to Granta about his award-winning fourth novel, Exit West (Riverhead Books, 2017), the job of being a writer, and what he has learned from Douglas Adams.
“I don’t really think you can teach people to write, you can just teach them to read. Read everything you can about your setting or your characters or whatever it is you don’t know.” In this Granta video, Sarah Moss, author of the novels Ghost Wall (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) and Summerwater (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), offers advice on first drafts, research, and the importance of reading to a writer.
“I have withheld more than I have written. I have restrained more than I have given. I have left unsaid more than I have said.” In this Granta video, Dionne Brand reads from her collection The Blue Clerk (McClelland & Stewart, 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.
“The book is a kind of implosion, emotionally and intellectually, and you just wait for some kind of rhythm to form.... And then I will work all day, every day.” Nicola Barker, who won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize for her novel H(a)ppy (William Heinemann, 2017), talks to Granta about her writing process and the difficulty of transitioning from writing on a digital screen to seeing the book in print form.
“The main advice I would have is to be really easy on yourself, to shut off as much as you can the voice that’s saying maybe you’re wasting your time, and maybe everything that you do is stupid.” Elif Batuman, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for her debut novel, The Idiot (Penguin Press, 2017), talks to Granta about the literary model of Charles M. Schulz’s Snoopy and the blurred boundary between fiction and nonfiction.
“To me, the world of novels often doesn’t feel real, and I was certainly quite aware of writing something kind of between poetry and prose.” Megan Hunter reads from her debut novel, The End We Start From (Grove Press, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and talks with Granta editorial director Max Porter about writing speculative fiction.
“The way that I write fiction is to kind of go in and just wander around.” In this video, Granta magazine’s Josie Mitchell speaks to Esmé Weijun Wang about her debut novel, The Border of Paradise (Unnamed Press, 2016), and her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, which won the 2016 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
“So much of my writing is supposed to fend off the autobiographical that I’ve managed to fend it off within myself as a personal practice.” Joshua Cohen, author of the novel Moving Kings (Random House, 2017) and one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017, talks about playing with the autobiographical impulse and writing as an existential practice.
Kathleen Jamie reads "The Whale-watcher" from her poetry collection The Tree House (Picador, 2004). Jamie's poetry was published in Issue 131 of Granta, which is featured in Literary MagNet in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
