Granta scores a century, but what lies ahead?

Anosh Malekar, a long-time fan of the original literary journal, writes about the history and spirit of Granta, which will publish its 100th issue in January 2008

In 1993, Bill Buford, the editor of Granta, issued a challenge to readers in the introduction to ‘Best of Young British Novelists 2’: “Put this issue away once you’ve finished (reading) it. Pull it out again in the spring – in the year 2003 – and see how we did.” Buford could afford to dare readers in such a manner, having a decade ago successfully compiled a list of promising writers in Britain when everyone else was debating the death of the British Novel.

I was blissfully unaware of Granta’s status as ‘the original literary journal’ when I picked up a dust-ridden copy of the 1983 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ lying at the bottom of a pile at a bookstore in Pune sometime in the early-1990s, and soon enough lost it by lending it to a colleague.

But something about the magazine -- Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ included Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Graham Swift -- kept me looking for it. It was not easy to find a Granta title then and it was not until the mid-1990s that I stumbled upon ‘Best of Young British Novelists 2’ during a visit to New Delhi.

Besides getting hooked to Ben Okri’s works after reading his ‘A Bizarre Courtship’ in the Granta issue, I also learned from Buford that this was nothing but a marketing campaign: “I should point out, especially for the foreign readers of this magazine, the reason for the proprietorial concern: ‘The Best of Young British Novelists’ is not only a special issue of Granta; it is a marketing campaign: at its most elementary level, nothing more than a gimmick to get people to buy literary novels.”

It was originally the idea of Desmond Clarke, who ran the Book Marketing Council, created in the characteristically ’80s belief that books should be treated like any other commodity, and that just as there was a Meat Marketing Council, urging everyone to go out and eat a British cow, so it followed there should be a comparable institution urging everyone to buy good, honest British novels.

My permanent engagement with this British literary holy cow began after I picked up a 1998 paperback of The Granta Book of Reportage in Ahmedabad. Granta has a book publishing imprint, Granta Books, which also came out with The Granta Book of Travel, published the same year. These became prized collections and introduced me to Ian Jack, a former editor of The Independent on Sunday, who had taken over from Buford and was editing the quarterly with the same gusto as his predecessor.

Now as one of the 50,000 subscribers around the world of ‘the most serious and highbrow of literary magazines’ I am eagerly awaiting its 100th issue scheduled for release in January 2008. The product summary says the special issue will be guest-edited by the acclaimed British novelist William Boyd.

The issue will feature original work by many of the writers who have helped to make it the most widely read literary magazine in the world. Contributors include Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, John le Carre, Doris Lessing, Jayne Anne Phillips, Harold Pinter, Nicholas Shakespeare, Helen Simpson, and Mario Vargas Llosa. It will also include new pieces by Buford and Jack and original photographs of many of the writers.

However, many followers of Granta like me will be keeping their fingers crossed on this issue. Granta is entering a new phase with a major change of guard at the management and editorial levels. For one, Jack has left in June after a touching valediction in the introduction to Granta 98: The Deep End, which ironically contains writing from people whose experience of life suggests they have something to tell us about survival.

Jack has made way for Jason Cowley, a former editor of Observer Sports Monthly, who was handpicked by its new owner, Sigrid Rausing, a Swedish philanthropist and heiress to the Tetra Pak fortune, who has decided to get more involved in the magazine editorially unlike her predecessor Rea Hederman.

Granta dates back to 1889, when it was launched as a political and literary magazine by students at Cambridge. Named after the river that runs through the town and today called the River Cam, it published the early works of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In the 1970s it ran into financial difficulties combined with student apathy and had to be rescued by a group of postgraduates led by Buford (an American) who edited it for 16 years since 1979.
According to The Independent, “Buford's Granta was wildly fashionable. It became a leading platform for reportage, new fiction and documentary photography, and a key arbiter in what would be regarded as "important writing".

Jack, who was Granta editor for 12 years since 1995, is popular as a soft spoken Scotsman and a much traveled journalist with stints in South Asia. Under his stewardship the magazine saw the expansion of the idea of what literature is by inclusion of memoirs, reportage and narrative history in its typically 250-odd pages brought out in paperback form.

In his valediction, Jack says: “Granta is, after all, ‘the magazine of new writing’ and as such needs perpetual enthusiasm for what ‘new writing’ may bring.” Mentioning that Granta now has editions in Spanish, Greek and occasionally Italian, besides an intended Portuguese edition, Jack says it’s not for him to analyse its enduring success. “I can only touch wood – but perhaps the critic on the London Observer caught an important part of its attraction when he wrote that Granta had ‘its face pressed against the window, determined to witness the world’.”

Despite this, there are concerns over the course Granta will take in the near future. The literary landscape is fast changing with a proliferation of reading groups and blogs that pontificate on everything via the net. There are many more arbiters of ‘important writing’ available in the market, and though Granta continues to hold on to its circulation of 50,000 worldwide, it is being said that its influence has declined considerably.

Jack doesn't agree that Granta is no longer a valuable platform for new writing. "It was never the typical literary magazine, which might last five years and have a bit of poetry and short stories and some abstract etchings by the editor's sister. It never even had a manifesto. It stands for the narrative, realistic tradition, the firmly conventional in literary form”.

I personally feel that despite the profusion of literary journals, there aren’t that many dealing with serious new writing. Granta is still important because commercial pressures will continue to ensure that publishers cannot fill in the magazine’s role of providing a perfect platform for new talent.

While wishing the best to Granta, one thing all its readers, especially in India, are going to miss is Jack the editor. Who else could have come out with The Granta Book of India: “I first went to India as a reporter. It was late-1976, in the last months of what India knew as ‘the Emergency’……..I got a visa because I promised to write about subjects which weren’t obviously political: the country’s great and romantic railways; cataract operations for the poor that were conducted thousands at a time in tented villages called ‘eye camps’ and of course the relics of the British Empire – summer hill resorts, graveyards, gentlemen’s clubs……”.

The issue on India has a typical Jack piece aptly titled ‘Unsteady People’ about the death of some 400 people by drowning after a launch overturned in the mighty Ganges near Manihari Ghat in Bihar. Jack drew parallels between “saffron pilgrims struggling to board their launch at Manihar ghat” and “the mass of Liverpoollian red and white which surged in the stadium at Sheffield” referring to the football stampede due to the ‘mass drunkenness’ among 3,000 Liverpool supporters, around the same time as the Bihar launch tragedy.

Typically Jack concluded: “It (the Liverpool stampede) could have been familiar to any citizen of Bihar. An underclass which, in view of the overclass, did no know how to behave. ‘Drunks…beasts…uneducated…ignorant.” And then referring to the football officials’ comments on British television that the 95 Sheffield stampede victims had not ‘died in vain’ or had ‘died for football’, Jack remarked: “Nobody in Bihar would have suggested that the dead of Manihari Ghat had made such a noble sacrifice…Whatever their other faults, Biharis are not a self-deluding people”.

Such insights, combined with memoirs, reportage and narrative history that was Jack’s hallmark and appeared in his introduction every quarter will be missed. Here’s hoping he will continue to contribute regularly to Granta. And that the magazine will continue to publish ‘important, new literature’.

Though, to borrow a cricketing term, it could be time to take a new stance after hitting the century.

Open Space, December 2007