Today Granta relaunches its project ‘New Voices’, in which we publish short fiction by exciting new writers; we will now be publishing an exclusive short story online six times a year. It is our chance to give these writers some of the recognition we feel they deserve, and to publish a few more of the many stories we receive - extending the space available in our print edition.

We are delighted to announce that our New Voice for February is Billy Kahora, whose story ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’ will go online tomorrow.

About Billy Kahora

Billy Kahora studied Creative Writing as a Chevening Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in 2007. Before that, he spent eight years studying and working in South Africa, and was Editorial Assistant for All Africa.com in Washington D.C. He also has degrees in journalism and media studies.

Kahora now lives and works in Kenya, where he is Managing Editor of the literary journal Kwani, established in Nairobi in 2003. He has called the publication ‘non-academic and non-institutionalised’. The writers and editors come from backgrounds of fiction and social commentary – and rather than coming from an already-established group, such as a university, want to create their own literary community.

Billy also edited ‘Kenya Burning’, a visual narrative of the post-election crisis in Kenya, published by the GoDown Arts Centre and Kwani Trust in March 2009. He is now collaborating on a book of non-fiction on environmental corruption in Kenya.

In an editorial for Kwani in 2005, entitled ‘The Fire Next Time OR A Half-Made Place: Between Tetra Paks and Plastic Bags’, Billy wrote:

‘All I might ask, starting with myself, is that my rhetoric, my theories, my musings – at least if I call myself a writer – can be seen between the pages of a book. That I am part of the defining texts of the here and now, and that they are written down and not just talked about. Because we really need them, as much as we need many other things, if we are to avoid, faint hope, the fire next time. And if we can’t avoid it – the moment has been defined for all to see.’

Interview

Granta’s Online Editor Ollie Brock spoke to Billy about his story ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’, his online journal Kwani, and the current state of literature in Africa. Read the interview here.

New Voices relaunch

Next week sees the relaunch of Granta’s New Voices project. New Voices is our space for promoting an exciting new fiction writer; we will be publishing a new exclusive short story online six times a year. There are no rules or restrictions on who we name as a New Voice – except that they write fiction, and are not widely known in that respect already. Click here to read all past stories.

Evie Wyld was our New Voice in May 2008; it was an extract from her novel After the Fire, A Still, Small Voice (Jonathan Cape, 2009), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 2009. Soumya Bhattacharya has had two books out since being featured in New Voices: All That You Can’t Leave Behind: Why We Can Never Do Without Cricket, and the novel If I Could Tell You, both published in India in 2009. We also published a story by academic and journalist writer Lana Asfour.

On Monday we will announce our New Voice for February, with an interview with the author – the story will follow on Tuesday.

Also

Listen to Ellah Allfrey’s interview with Martin Kimani as he talks about his Granta 109 essay ‘The Work of War’, on the BBC World Service’s ‘The Strand’ programme. You can read his article for free here.

Martin Kimani will also be speaking at the Travellers’ Tales Festival in Oxford next Saturday (20th February), in the New Voices in Travel Writing event, curated by Granta.

New Artistic Director at Granta

Granta magazine is delighted to announce the appointment of Michael Salu as Artistic Director.

For the past five years Michael has been Senior Designer at CCVP, Random House UK. Working on a range of titles across the lists, he designed several jackets for Vintage Classics - a prestigious list that included Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, Bruce Chatwin and many others.

Salu has also worked with the musician Tricky, designing the merchandise for his most recent tour and the new deluxe edition of his first album Maxinquaye. As a freelance brand consultant, he was responsible for creating and designing the new brand identity for Curzon Cinemas, recently launched across all the group’s activities.

Editor John Freeman says – ‘Michael is a profoundly intelligent and stylish designer, and we’re all thrilled that he is on board to help us make the magazine as beautiful on the outside as it is on the inside.’

Michael Salu said – ‘Granta has a history of iconic cover designs and photo essays. This is a fantastic opportunity to develop a distinctive aesthetic presence for the magazine in all its activities. I am excited about working with that intelligent visual heritage to complement the magazine’s reputation for championing new writing.’

For further information please contact Pru Rowlandson on
pru@granta.com or 020 7605 1373

Colum McCann has won the National Book Award Fiction Prize for Let the Great World Spin. Last night’s event made the Irish author one of only three foreign-born writers to win the award in its sixty-year history. Let the Great World Spin focuses on promise, mystery and mortality in 1970s New York, on the day that French trapeze artist Philippe Petit walked a high-wire suspended between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.

Accepting the award at the black-tie awards ceremony at Manhattan’s Cipriani Wall Street restaurant, McCann spoke of the obligations of his craft. ‘As fiction writers and people who believe in the word,’ he said, ‘we have to enter the anonymous corners of human experience to make that little corner right.’

Granta 109: Work, forthcoming in January 2010, features a new essay by McCann.

November 9, 2009 was the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Granta 42: ‘Krauts’ (1992) explored the newly unified Germany’s shifting self, and the seismic impact the event had on Europe and the world. Granta 42 was driven by one ‘simple question’: ‘What is the new Germany?’ Essays by Martha Gellhorn, Ian Buruma, Günter Grass, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and others reveal that the answer to this ‘simple question’ is not so simple at all.

For the first time online, subscribers to Granta.com can now read Ian Buruma’s essay, ‘Buchenwald’, and Martha Gellhorn’s provocative ‘Ohne Mich: Why I Shall Never Return to Germany’, which maps the intersection between the personal and the political.

Purchase a copy of Granta 42 today.

Evie Wyld, one of Granta.com’s New Voices in 2008, has been shortlisted for the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, which celebrates the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry or drama) by a UK or Commonwealth writer aged thirty-five or under. Wyld’s New Voices story, ‘Something Close to Heaven,’ later formed part of her debut novel, After the Fire, a Still, Small Voice (Cape), which was published this year to critical acclaim. You can read the Granta.com interview with Wyld here.

Another writer on the shortlist is Orange Broadband Prize-winning novelist Chimamanda Adichie, for her short-story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (Fourth Estate). Adichie contributed to Granta 92, 95, 98 and 99.

The other books shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize are

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic Books)

The Striped World by Emma Jones (Faber and Faber)

Six Months in Sudan by James Maskalyk (Canongate)

Waste by Tristram Stuart (Allen Lane)

The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London, on Monday 30 November. Chair of Judges Louise Doughty has said of this year’s shortlist, ‘We’re very pleased to have chosen such a strong and diverse list... Although the books were judged solely on quality, four different genres are represented by writers living across the globe - it’s a truly international selection with authors from Nigeria, India, Canada, the UK and Australia. We have one collection of poetry, two works of non-fiction, one short story collection and two novels, one of which is arguably a “hybrid” book. As such, this list is a fascinating display of the range and strength of contemporary writing by young writers. It will be very hard to choose just one book from it and the prize is wide open.’

Granta.com’s New Voices, which showcases exciting fiction by emerging writers, will be relaunched shortly.

Granta is delighted to present a talk by award-winning author Alex Kotlowitz part of the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas.

A boiling cauldron of racial and economic discord, crisis and contention, yet simultaneously one of America’s most iconic, historic and fascinating cities, Chicago is the perfect perch from which to peer into the dark heart of America. Kotlowitz will read from his essay, ‘Khalid’ (published in Granta 108: ‘Chicago’) and speak about exploring America from the ground up at a free public lecture, part of the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas on Friday (23rd October).

A New York native, Kotlowitz describes himself as an ‘accidental Chicagoan’, locating the city at the heart of his writing; the self-enclosed neighbourhoods, each with their own spirit and stories, some more gritty than others.

His bestselling book, There Are No Children Here, which chronicles the lives of two boys struggling to survive in a Chicago public housing complex, was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important books of the century. In 1993 it was made into a television film for ABC.

Kotlowitz’s latest book, Never a City so Real, a selection of short stories, takes readers on a tour of the ‘lifeblood’, the people who have helped him to understand Chicago and in a broader sense America itself.

No booking is required, the event will take place at Mill Lane Lecture Rooms in Cambridge and will begin at 2 p.m.

This year, the Cambridge Festival of Ideas will celebrate the University’s 800th Anniversary with over 150 free events open to visitors of all ages. For more information on the event and to see the full programme for The Festival of Ideas please click here.

Purchase your copy of Granta 108: ‘Chicago’

Find out more about ‘Chicago’

Don Paterson has won the prestigious Forward poetry prize for best collection with Rain. At the awards ceremony last Wednesday at London’s Somerset House, the judges lauded the Scottish poet’s ‘total mastery of his art’. Judge and former Forward prizewinner David Harsent called Rain ‘knee-weakeningly good ... [it] unsettles and enchants.’

Paterson triumphed over the year’s exceptionally strong shortlist of poets, which included Peter Porter (Better Than God), Christopher Reid (A Scattering), Glyn Maxwell (Hide Now), Hugo Williams (West End Final) and Sharon Olds (One Secret Thing). At forty-five, Paterson was the youngest poet on the shortlist.

The Forward Poetry Prizes, the richest set of annual awards in the United Kingdom, were launched in 1991 to draw public attention to contemporary poetry. This year’s £10,000 award for best collection marks Paterson’s third Forward prize; he won in 1993 for best first collection with Nil Nil, and last year for best single poem with ‘Love Poem For Natalie “Tusja” Beridze’.

Paterson is a Granta contributor – his poem, ‘The Swing’, appears in Granta’s celebratory 100th issue. His memoir, ‘If With His Skirt He Do Touch Bread or Pottage’, appears in Granta 105.

See also: Granta contributors shortlisted for 2009 Forward Prize

Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist, has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Müller, fifty-six, is internationally renowned for her portrayal of life under dictatorship. Announcing the 2009 award, the Swedish Academy praised Müller, ‘who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed’.

Müller’s first German-language works were censored in Romania for their brutal, graphic depictions of Ceausescu’s oppressive regime. The manuscript for Niederungen (Lowlands) was smuggled into Germany and received instant critical acclaim upon publication there.

Müller is the first German writer to win the Nobel Prize since Günter Grass in 1999. Her award falls on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Communism in Europe. Müller continues to speak out against totalitarianism and collaboration today.

The award will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10. As the winner, Müller will receive ten million Swedish kronor (approximately £892,000 or $1.4 million).

Granta Books published Müller’s novel The Land of Green Plums in 1998.

Congratulations to Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker prize for her majestic Wolf Hall. Densely researched and beautifully written, this is a book full of intensely observed and deeply absorbing characters. The rise of Thomas Cromwell from abused urchin to advisor to the king is re-imagined here with skill and warmth. Even as he schemes against Katherine of Aragon and sends Thomas More to his death, the reader loves him for his (albeit strategic) compassion for the ill-favoured princess, Mary, and the loving chaos of his family life. With the proliferation of history and fiction that feeds our seemingly insatiable appetite for Tudor history, it is hard to think of any book that could match the faultless prose of this master storyteller.

Read Hilary Mantel in Granta 101, Granta 63: ‘Beasts’ and Granta 56: ‘What Happened to Us?

Aleksandar Hemon won the 2009 inaugural St. Francis College Literary Prize for his short-story collection, Love and Obstacles. The $50,000 award, presented at last night’s Gala Opening Party of the Brooklyn Book Festival, is among the most lucrative Literary prizes in the United States. The SFC jury includes authors Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction-winner Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn), author and co-editor of The Believer magazine Heidi Julavits (The Uses of Enchantment: A Novel), author and professor at the MFA writing program at Columbia University Ben Marcus (Notable American Women) and New York Times bestselling author Ayelet Waldman (Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace).

Aleksandar Hemon was raised in Sarajevo and lives in Chicago today. Love and Obstacles draws together the tale of a young man set to leave communist Sarajevo as the city reels from the Bosnian war. Hemon’s essay, If God Existed, He’d be a Solid Midfielder, which explores immigrant and expatriate communities in Chicago and the shared experience of sport, appears in Granta 108: ‘Chicago’.

Read Aleksandar Hemon’s essay, A Shining Monument of Loss, from Granta 103

Read advance praise for ‘Chicago’

Granta acting editor John Freeman introduces the ‘Chicago’ issue, in this short film

Attend Granta events in Chicago

See the cover of Granta’s special ‘Chicago’ issue, designed by Chris Ware

Purchase Granta 108 ‘Chicago’

Read new writing from Heidi Julavits and Jonathan Lethem

The longlist for this year’s Guardian First Book Award was announced today.

A Swamp Full of Dollars by Michael Peel
An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
The Secret Lives of Buildings by Edward Hollis
Direct Red by Gabriel Weston
The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
The Missing by Sian Hughes

Michael Peel’s essay about the oil industry, ‘Paradox of Plenty’, appeared on Granta.com in March. Petina Gappah’s ‘An Open Letter to Thabo Mbeki’ was published on Granta.com last year. Eleanor Catton’s debut novel, The Rehearsal, was published by Granta Books and has already won a Betty Trask Award – you can read the first chapter online. Catton’s short story, ‘Two Tides’, appeared in Granta 106: New Fiction Special. You can watch a Granta.com interview with her here.

The shortlist will be announced in November.

Tim Guest, a contributor to Granta magazine whose first book was published by Granta Books, has died at the age of thirty-four following a suspected heart attack.

‘Orange People’, Guest’s memoir of his childhood spent at an ashram in rural Suffolk, was published in Granta 80: ‘The Group’. In 1978, Guest’s mother became a ‘sannyasin’, a follower of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. A year later, at the age of four, Guest followed suit, adopting the practice of wearing ‘clothes the colour of the sun’ and taking the name of Yogesh, a Sanskrit word for God. ‘Orange People’ grew into his first book My Life in Orange, published in 2004. This was followed in 2007 by Second Lives, an exploration of the virtual worlds existing online, undertaken with the help of his avatar, Errol Mysterio.

Guest’s writing was irreverent, poignant and sensitive. As well as his contribution to Granta, he wrote for the Guardian, the Observer and the Telegraph. You can find out more about his books here.

The shortlist for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced earlier today. The six shortlisted novels are:

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman (Picador)

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (Cape)

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt (Harvill Secker)

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deidre Madden (Faber)

Home by Marilynne Robinson (Virago)

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)

Listen to Granta editor Alex Clark discuss the shortlist on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

The Orwell Prize shortlists were announced on Wednesday night at an event in London, and Andrew Brown’s Fishing In Utopia – published by Granta Books last year – was among the six titles chosen in the Books category from a longlist of eighteen.

Although born in London, Brown lived in Sweden as a child during the 1960s. He returned to Sweden a decade later, living first on an estate on the edge of Gothenburg and later in a makeshift chalet in the forest, where fishing became an obsession. Fishing in Utopia combines a memoir of his time in the country with an exploration of Sweden’s political and social system, which for a decade or so seemed to have made it a modern progressive utopia, combining a generous welfare system, a liberal attitude to immigration and an industrial economy that prized energy conservation and environmental protection. Sweden was also the subject of the author’s piece ‘In the Clearing’, published in Granta 93: ‘God’s Own Countries'.

The other shortlisted titles in the Books category, judged by Ferdinand Mount and Granta magazine’s former editor Ian Jack, are Tony Judt’s Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, Owen Matthews’ Stalin's Children, Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Chinese Whispers, Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos and Mark Thompson’s The White War.

John Updike, one of America’s most accomplished novelists, died of lung cancer today. He was seventy-six. His writing career spanned more than fifty years, during which he produced over twenty novels, as well as highly regarded collections of short fiction, essays, memoir and poetry. A writer of astonishing discipline and quality, Updike’s best work reflects the changing mores of America in the second half of the twentieth century, a country that shifted, expanded and re-invented itself, much like the author’s own prose. Envied and adulated by other writers (but impossible to successfully imitate), he won every major literary award, with the exception of the Nobel Prize. He was also an early contributor to Granta.

Perhaps no other contemporary American writer was as concerned about the tensions between men and women; about the dangers and delights of desire; about sex and its consequences; about small-town childhood and restless adolescence; about the pleasures and pains of suburban existence. Updike’s second novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), is a worthwhile companion to Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961). Rabbit, Run is the first in Updike’s Rabbit quartet, which follows the journey of an aging American everyman, cast adrift in a country that he barely recognises but marching ever onwards. The Rabbit novels are an extraordinary accomplishment: grandly ambitious in scope (each novel is bigger and busier than the one before) but also poignant and precise, open to sensation and intelligently alive. Updike’s early training as an artist at Oxford University can be felt in his prose, in his attention to detail, his quick eye, his feel for texture and colour and shadow and mood. His writing delineates and distils not only the expansive, important moments in life but also the ordinary, uneventful ones, which are far more plentiful. Or, as Updike described this element of his craft, ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due’. But there was nothing mundane about Updike’s prose – bustling, buoyant, erotic, playful, watchful, original and intense – which, at its best, was better than almost anyone’s.

Read obituaries from the Associated Press, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, UPI, the London Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, the Scotsman, the BBC, ITN, CNN and Sky News.

Read tributes from Adam Gopnik, John Irving, Michiko Kakutani, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Martin Amis, Jay Parini, Boyd Tonkin, Todd Gitlin, William Boyd, Lev Grossman, Tom Leonard, Erica Wagner, David L. Ulin, Malcolm Jones, David Baddiel, Christopher Tayler, Robert Fulford, Brooke Allen, Joseph Rago, John Mark Eberhart, Mick Brown, Xan Brooks and Troy Patterson.

Read an appraisal by John Freeman, Granta’s US editor.

Watch Updike’s recent video interview with Sam Tanenhaus, for the New York Times.

Watch John Updike being interviewed by Charlie Rose.

Read Updike’s Featured Author page at the New York Times.

Listen to an interview with Updike on BBC’s Radio 4.

Listen to New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers (incorrectly identified by the presenter as ‘Robert Summers’) discuss Updike with the BBC.

Listen to novelists Philip Hensher and John Banville discuss Updike’s ‘untranslatable’ genius on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Watch Ian McEwan tell BBC Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman about his late friendship with Updike and how a love of the writer’s work brought he and his wife together.

Watch Newsnight’s Stephen Smith reflect upon Updike’s life and books.

The BBC and Guardian recount tributes to Updike by other writers.

Granta contributor Decca Aitkenhead has an interview with British-born, German-raised novelist Charlotte Roche in the Guardian. Roche’s debut novel, Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete), was a controversial bestseller in Germany last year. For Granta.com last October, Philip Oltermann conducted the first English-language interview with Roche. You can read the interview here.

Before last Tuesday’s inauguration, the BBC asked acclaimed novelist and Granta contributor Joseph O’Neill what he is looking forward to in an Obama administration. O’Neill will be one of the speakers at the special Granta 104: ‘Fathers’ event in New York City on January 27. To find out more about the event, click here

Congratulations to Aleksandar Hemon whose novel The Lazarus Project was recently announced as a finalist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. Hemon contributed to Granta 103: ‘The Rise of the British Jihad’.

Fathers: The Men Who Made Us
with Joseph O’Neill and Jonathan Lethem
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 7pm

On Tuesday January 27, Granta’s US Editor John Freeman will be joined by Joseph O’Neill and Jonathan Lethem to discuss ‘Fathers: The Men Who Made Us’. For Granta 104, both writers responded to their favourite photographs of their fathers: Kevin O’Neill, an engineer whose career took him from Balikpapan, Borneo to Barry, South Wales; and Richard Lethem, a ‘painter and poet and political activist’ in 1970s New York. (You can read Jonathan Lethem’s piece here.)

Joseph O’Neill was born in Ireland and raised primarily in Holland. He received a law degree from Cambridge University and worked as a barrister in London. He writes regularly for the Atlantic Monthly and is the author of three novels, Netherland, This Is the Life and The Breezes, and a family history, Blood-Dark Track, which was a New York Times Notable Book and was first published by Granta Books.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of several novels, including Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Award. He is also the author of the story collection The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye and the novella This Shape We’re In. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and many other periodicals.

This event will be held at Housing Works Bookstore at 126 Crosby Sreet, New York. Tickets are free. For more information, please call (212) 334-3324 or visit www.housingworksbookstore.org.

Martin Amis and Friends
Photographs by Angela Gorgas

National Portrait Gallery, London

Jan 10 - July 5, 2009

When Angela Gorgas first met Martin Amis in 1977 she was sharing a house in Maida Vale with Amschel Rothschild and the writer Candia McWilliam while working as a portraitist and freelance photographer. Amis was literary editor of the New Statesman. The couple became engaged in 1978 and, in 1979, moved to Paris for several months.

Taken in London and Paris, these previously unseen photographs feature literary and social figures including Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens, Kingsley Amis, James Fenton and Pat Kavanagh. They document the period during which Amis was working on the novels Success and Other People, and the screenlpay for the film Saturn 3.

Find out more.

Harold Pinter, one of Britain’s most influential and important writers, died on Christmas Eve. He was seventy-eight. In addition to writing twenty-nine plays, Pinter, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2005, was an acclaimed screenwriter, essayist and poet. Pinter’s work appeared in five issues of this magazine, most recently in Granta 100 with ‘Poem’, a moving tribute to his wife of thirty-three years, Lady Antonia Fraser.

Read obituaries from the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, the New York Times, Reuters and the Associated Press.

Read a tribute from Pinter’s biographer and friend Michael Billington.

Listen to New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley on Pinter’s legacy and read his 2005 appraisal.

Read the Guardian’s David Smith on literary London in mourning.

Read Harold Pinter’s archive page in the New York Times.

Read the Guardian’s Pinter primer.

Watch Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel acceptance speech, or read it here.

Read the Nobel Committee’s 2005 press release.

Visit Harold Pinter’s official website.

Listen to a post-Nobel Prize interview with Pinter.

Listen to Harold Pinter talking to the British Library.

Listen to Mark Lawson’s Front Row interview with Pinter.

Listen to BBC4’s Today interview with Pinter.

Read a 2006 conversation between Pinter and Michael Billington.

Visit the BBC’s Pinter page.

Visit the website of the Harold Pinter Society.