granta

History

Granta was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as "The Granta". It was started as a periodical featuring student politics, badinage and literary efforts and was named after the river that runs through the town. An early editor of the magazine was RP Keigwin, the England Cricketer and Danish Scholar. In this form the magazine had both a long and distinguished history. The magazine has published student and early work of various writers who later became well known, including:

Rebirth

During the 1970s the publication enountered financial difficulties and increasing levels of student apathy and as a result had to be rescued by a group of interested postgraduates. it was then relaunched in 1979 as a magazine of "new writing" aimed at both both writers and a wider audience than the orignal Cambrdige limited one. Granta has been edited by Ian Jack since 1995. As of September 2004, its circulation was 46,831. It now publishes four times a year a mix of:

new writingfiction
personal history
reportage and inquiring journalism

Granta Best of Young British Novelists

In 1983, Granta (issue #7) published a list of 20 young British novelists as names to watch out for in the future. Since then, the magazine has repeated the exercise in 1993 (issue #43) and in 2003 (issue #81). In 1996 (issue #54), Granta also published a similar list of promising young American novelists.

The 1983 List

Martin Amis
William Boyd
Maggie Gee
Kazuo Ishiguro
Adam Mars-Jones
Salman Rushdie
Julian Barnes
Ursula Bentley
Pat Barker
Buchi Emecheta
Ian McEwan
Shiva Naipaul
Graham Swift
Rose Tremain
Clive Sinclair
Alan Judd
Philip Norman
A.N. Wilson
Christopher Priest
Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

The 1993 List

Kazuo Ishiguro
Hanif Kureishi
Ben Okri
Esther Freud
Caryl Phillips
Will Self
Iain Banks
Adam Lively
Helen Simpson
Tibor Fischer
Nicholas Shakespeare
Philip Kerr
Lawrence Norfolk
Louis de Bernieres
A.L. Kennedy
Alan Hollinghurst
Candia McWilliam
Anne Billson
Adam Mars-Jones
Jeanette Winterson

The 2003 List

Monica Ali
Nicola Barker
Rachel Cusk
Peter Ho Davies
Susan Elderkin
Philip Hensher
A. L. Kennedy
Hari Kunzru
Toby Litt
David Mitchell
Andrew O'Hagan
David Peace
Dan Rhodes
Ben Rice
Rachel Seiffert
Zadie Smith
Adam Thirlwell
Alan Warner
Sarah Waters
Robert McLiam Wilson

The 1996 List of American Novelists

Sherman Alexie
Madison Smartt Bell
Ethan Canin
Edwidge Danticat
Tom Drury
Tony Earley
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jonathan Franzen
David Guterson
David Haynes
Allen Kurzweil
Elizabeth McCracken
Lorrie Moore
Fay Myenne Ng
Robert O'Connor
Chris Offutt
Stewart O'Nan
Mona Simpson
Melanie Rae Thon
Kate Wheeler

Recent contributors

Recent contributors to the magazine include:

Every issue since 1979 is still in print. Older issues are widely available in used bookstores, as well as directly from the publisher. The publishers state that some of them— Travel (Granta 10) and The Family (Granta 37), for example are "significant contributions to the literature of the English language."