Granta's spring issue, guest-edited by award-winning writer Rana Dasgupta, explores membranes of the tissue, self, collective, nation, species and cosmos. It features new poetry by Andrew McMillan, Tishani Doshi and Ida B�rjel, a new translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, as well as photography from Anita Khemka, Arturo Soto and M�nica de la Torre. Granta 151: Membranes showcases cutting-edge fiction from Lydia Davis, Fatin Abbas, Steven Heighton, J. Robert Lennon, Mahreen Sohail and Chloe Wilson, plus a host of thought-provoking - Emanuele Coccia on birth, metamorphosis and the very strange miracle of life- Mark Doty on gentrification and homelessness in New York City- Anouchka Grose on infidelity and the idea of the unwanted third- Ruchir Joshi on all those kids his son once was- Kapka Kassabova on Lake Ohrid- Anita Roy on the great crested newt- Esther Woolfson on the relationship between humans and Eyal Weizman in conversation with Rana Dasgupta, on contemporary architectural strategies for repelling and dividing people.
Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian writer. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He lives in Delhi, India.
His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), was an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization. Billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales, thirteen passengers stuck overnight in an airport tell thirteen stories from different cities in the world, stories that resemble contemporary fairytales, mythic and surreal. The tales add up to a broad exploration of 21st century forms of life, which includes billionaires, film stars, migrant labourers, illegal immigrants and sailors. [1] Tokyo Cancelled was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Dasgupta's second novel, Solo (2009) is an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man. Having achieved little in his twentieth-century life, he settles into a long and prophetic daydream of the twenty-first century, where all the ideological experiments of the old century are over, and a collection of startling characters - demons and angels - live a life beyond utopia.