Introduction

I possess a complete run of Granta except for issue number one. Granta 1 is forever unobtainable, I’ve decided. It’s gone, it’s vanished. I’ve been trying for years to find it in antiquarian booksellers, and more lately on the Web, but in vain (I have the 1989 limited-edition reprint, of course, but it’s not the same, not the genuine article). And my search is fuelled by the bitterly enduring knowledge that, once, I did actually have Granta 1. I bought it in Oxford in 1979 and owned it for a while and then lost it. I have the original numbers two to six, also extremely rare, the issues that appeared before Granta’s association with Penguin began with the celebrated Granta 7 — the first ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ — but having them and the rest and not having number one still irritates and frustrates.

I cite this as evidence of the longevity of my connection with the magazine, but in fact the link goes back even further, pre-dating the acquisition of the missing Granta 1. In 1979 I was living in Oxford trying to finish a doctoral thesis and teaching in various Oxford colleges as a jobbing lecturer. I had just had my first novel accepted by a London publisher, but I was going to have to wait until January 1981 to see it published. I was reviewing books, writing short stories, and was seized with a sense of being engaged with literary life in a way that I haven’t fully replicated since. I read everything. I bought all the little magazines. Nothing stirred in the undergrowth of the literary world that didn’t attract my beady-eyed attention. At the same time, Susan, my wife, was working at Oxford University Press, running the publicity and marketing for the English Literature and Oxford Poetry lists. One night she came home from work with news of a new literary magazine that was starting up: she had met the editor, some American guy, who was looking for advertising, and she had decided to take a page in support.

What magazine? I asked, cultural antennae quivering. The old Cambridge University magazine, Granta, she said. This American, Bill Buford, is reviving it. My scoff was audible. Bad idea, I remember saying — a university magazine? As well revive Isis (Oxford’s equivalent to Granta, to which I had been a regular contributor) and try to remarket it as a literary journal. Moreover, Granta was a terrible name — as bad as Isis (another river). What does it say to potential readers? Nothing. Misguided idea all round, hasn’t a hope, no legs.

I enjoy it when naysayers get their comeuppance and I happily castigate myself for my condescension and lack of prescience on this occasion. But it was this early whiff of Granta that made me buy Granta 1, when I saw it on sale in a little shop in Broad Street, opposite Balliol, that seemed to sell every literary magazine in the world. My scepticism fell from me immediately. This wasn’t a magazine: it was like a paperback book. It had a title: ‘New American Writing’. Writers such as William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag were listed on the contents’ page. This was indeed the old Cambridge University magazine, but fearlessly reinvented. It looked very impressive. And there was the editor’s name — William Buford — the American who’d come to Oxford University Press looking for advertising. The serendipitous connection made me buy it and made me buy the next issue also, with its blazing red cover and its publication of George Steiner’s entire novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. And then I bought Granta 3, with its provocative title, ‘The End of the English Novel’. As someone whose English novel was about to appear, I read its grim prognostications and faint glimmerings of hope for the moribund form with appalled fascination. Here was a new writer called Salman Rushdie with an extract from a novel called Midnight’s Children; here were Angela Carter and Russell Hoban, Lorna Sage and Christine Brooke-Rose. How did one join this gang?

The fact was that Granta had arrived in its first year of publication fully formed and fighting fit, establishing itself very quickly as something entirely different from its peers and competitors. Indeed, the ambitions it set out for itself in its first year of publication haven’t changed that much in its subsequent vivacious life. By Granta 2 it was already bullishly advertising itself in this way:

With issues of two, three and four hundred pages, the literary quarterly we now publish is unlike anything you’ll find in Britain. It is part magazine, part journal, part paperback book, an anthology dealing not just in fiction but in writing of all kinds — short stories, essays, autobiographies, histories, poetry, even whole novels — but always writing which is vital and challenging.

Granta’s young, brash and audacious boast has been more than lived up to. Its claims to fame — the invention of ‘Dirty Realism’ in new American writing, its intriguingly themed numbers, its eyecatching covers (with David Hockney’s wonderful artwork for this issue acting as a centennial apotheosis), its photo essays, its reinvigoration of the travel writing genre, and its encouragement of its own brand of reportage (highly personal, often very intrepid, always well written) — have always been leavened over the nearly thirty years of its life by the fiction it has published. For a writer of fiction, the great appeal of Granta has been that you could write at almost any length and without censorship. Anything genuinely goes. It’s surprising how few magazines offer these literary freedoms.

My own move from paying customer to contributor came in 1983, with the publication of Granta 7 and the first selection of the ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. All twenty of us contributed a work of fiction, and that first
Granta story of mine was called ‘Extracts from the Journal of Flying Officer J’, a reworking (with illustrations by the author) of ‘As You Like It’, seen through the distorting lens of W.H. Auden’s The Orators. Its publication was a forceful example of Granta’s generous latitude to its writers.

Over the years, under Bill Buford’s and then Ian Jack’s editorship, seven stories of mine have appeared in the magazine, more than in any other individual publication. So perhaps it is oddly fitting that the journey of my own Granta life to date should have progressed in this way: from supercilious sceptic to regular contributor to enthusiastic guest editor. My objective for Granta 100 has been very simple: to ask a selection of writers associated with the magazine to provide something as yet unpublished for this milestone edition. Almost all the writers in this issue (poets apart) have been published by Granta before — and some many times. Poetry pretty much died out after the first few issues of the magazine, but the inclusion of ten poets here is in the hope it won’t be neglected in the future. Fulfilling another Granta tradition of blazing a trail, there are four ‘new voices’ — Tash Aw, Lucy Eyre, Helen Oyeyemi and Ingo Schulze — who haven’t previously appeared in its pages.

Granta 3 floated the idea of ‘The End of the English Novel’. Over the many years of its existence Granta’s own example and practice have disproved this notion. The baleful note was unfounded: not only the English novel, but also other forms of writing that Granta has championed show robust and dynamic signs of life — something underlined by the appearance of this hundredth issue of the magazine. Those gathered together here are all part of Granta’s past, present and future history and they form a small selection of Granta’s wider community of writers, the hundreds who have contributed to the magazine over its long life: Granta’s tertulia, if you like. The Spanish word is richer and more nuanced than the English equivalent, ‘circle of friends’, implying as it does that the links between the members of the tertulia are particularly strong, the intellectual bonds more firm, the shared cultural values all important. I hope that Granta 100 shows that spirit to be secure and thriving.