Increasingly, we live in a world where the glut of published literature makes finding the work of genuinely talented young writers extremely difficult, especially for the person in the street. Consequently, the task has been delegated to newspaper critics and, of course, to a handful of literary publications.
One such publication, Granta magazine, hailed as Britain’s “most impressive literary magazine”, has managed to turn discovering new talent into an art form.
From being the original platform for the early work of writers such as Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, Granta has continued to publish both the fiction and non-fiction of new authors, many of whom have gone on to become household names.
It wasn’t always so. The magazine was originally founded in 1889 by a group of Cambridge University students who wanted to start publishing a journal of student political and literary works.
For 80 years the publication was reasonably successful — its close ties to the university meant it had access to the work of writers of the calibre of AA Milne and Ted Hughes. But by the late 1970s things were looking bleak, with money troubles and general apathy seeming to have secured the journal’s failure.
Enter American Bill Buford, a postgraduate Cambridge student and a man with an uncanny knack for being able to find new, talented writers. Turning a crumbling student journal into one of the world’s most widely-read literary magazines is no small feat, but Buford did just that.
He was to serve as the relaunched publication’s editor for the next 16 years. Granta‘s success was both a marketing triumph and a timely accident.
Buford convinced multinational giant Penguin to invest in and market the magazine on a quarterly basis, but the relaunch of the publication also coincided with the arrival of a crop of young, talented writers — Rushdie, Amis and Ian McEwan among them.
Granta diverges in both form and content from the archetypal literary journal. It never publishes poetry or “writing about writing” and avoids reviews of current novels, although it will publish excerpts from new books. The magazine is also unusual in that it places reportage and non-fiction on the same footing as fiction and has a particular fondness for what current editor Ian Jack describes as “the realistic narrative”.
Granta‘s formula developed early on — each edition has a theme and all the pieces published in that edition are related, sometimes tenuously, to the topic. Some of the more famous issues include The Family (number 47) and, more recently, What We Think of America (number 77), widely regarded as one of the most lucid anthologies of post-September 11 writing. Yet Granta is probably best known for being the publication that redefined the concept of armchair travel, having printed both the early and more recent work of Bill Bryson and Gabriel Gárcia Márquez. Even Granta‘s critics agree that the magazine was almost solely responsible for the boom in travel publishing that ensued in the early 1980s.
Twenty-four years later, Granta has relocated from Cambridge to London, cut its ties with the university and Penguin and is now owned and published by American Rea Hederman, also the publisher of the New York Review of Books. Buford moved on in 1995 to take up a post as literary editor of The New Yorker and was replaced by Jack.
Little has changed under Jack’s leadership and the magazine continues to favour the newsworthy and publish the writing of new authors.
Besides the consistent high quality of the writing that appears in the magazine, one of the factors that has kept Granta firmly in the public eye, particularly in Britain, has been its list of best young British novelists every 10 years.
This year’s list included the likes of Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, two of Britain’s most exciting young writers. Along with 18 others, they join the ranks of Rushdie, McEwan, Amis, Julian Barnes, Iain Banks, Ben Okri, Kazuo Ishiguro and Will Self, all of whom have made the list in the past.
Its influence is apparent when one sees that most of these authors were on it long before they attained any degree of popular success. Some of the authors listed this year had not even published a book yet.
As Jack says, the list is “an exercise to publicise literary writing in a world where ‘thrilling debut by a young writer’ has become the standard blurb”.