Waiting for Granta

Discussions on the new still-unreleased issue have already begun. It will be delivered on December 14, but for a week now we’ve been debating on its bill of fare. It’s the publication’s 100th issue and has all my heroes contributing — Salman Rushdie, Alan Hollinghurst, Mario Vargas Llosa, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Hanif Kureshi, among others.

That may be enough reason to anticipate its arrival, but there’s more. For followers of arguably the greatest literary magazine, it’s announces a new phase. Granta is changing guard with this issue. The magazine’s editor of 12 years, the prolific Ian Jack, has made way for James Cowley, and this will be Cowley’s first baby.

Jack’s valediction was expected ever since the magazine’s new owner as of last year, Sigrid Rausing, decided she wanted to be editorially involved in what is known as the most serious and highbrow of literary magazines.

In many ways, Granta’s has previewed the literary mood of the time. Since its inception in Cambridge University in 1889, the periodical has come to be known as a bastion of high quality, new writing in English. It first published writings of the then-amateur scribblers — Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Stevie Smith.

Every decade it publishes a cherry-picked list of who they think are the best writers to look out for. Among Best of Young British Novelists swaggered Amis, McEwan, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift and Louis de Bernieres on the scene. Granta also spoke about global warming in This Overheating World (October 2003) much before Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio made it fashionable, and of a paradigm shift in the world’s reverence of the US in What We Think Of America as early as March 2002.

Granta’s legacy is really all about the story. Each issue has one topic represented through the works of many authors, perspectives, histories and visions. It also works as a beginner’s guide to contemporary literature. If you’ve read their four quarterlies, you’re pretty much on the ball where new writing and budding novelists are concerned. As Jack writes in his outgoing editorial, each article describes “the interesting or the alarming things happening that have yet to be turned into a book or a manuscript; and sometimes to publish pieces not so much for their literary value but because the experience of their writers means they have something urgent or important to tell us”. 

Rausing has been accused of taking injecting her human rights interests into the journal and turning it into ‘activist non-fiction’ instead of a collage of fiction, personal history, reportage and documented photography it once stood for.

It has also been argued that Granta’s sheen has dulled in the last few years. In the time of blogs and an explosion of other also very fine literary manuals (such as the London Review of Books, and Slightly Foxed), Granta seems to be struggling to maintain its status as a literary kingmaker.

I seriously doubt its readers, a respectable size of 50,000, will be much affected. Bill Buford, Jack’s anteceding editor has appropriately called them “the world’s smartest and most literary strangers”. There are many, like the Scottish whisky guru Charles Maclean, who have read “every issue of Granta ever published”.

And really, Granta is still worth racing the husband to the door for.

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