Author(s): Sigrid Rausing

Essays

Granta 147 will be our Fortieth Birthday Special. This will be a celebratory issue featuring a collection of the best essays and fiction from the magazine's lauded history.

It has now been forty years since Bill Buford, Jonathan Levi and Peter de Bolla relaunched Cambridge University's student publication as the internationally renowned literary magazine we know today. In that time Granta has published 26 Nobel Prize for Literature winners, award-winning journalism from writers like Martha Gellhorn, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Svetlana Alexievich, defined new literary genres and paved the way for generations of young novelists.
In this special, celebratory issue of Granta, we will be republishing a selection of our favourite pieces from the magazine's distinguished archive, along with a selection of letters and photographs from behind the scenes. This will be a collector's issue and is not to be missed.

This special edition, marking Granta’s 40th birthday, brings together some the best new writing since 1979. Republished here is a selection of short essays from 30 of the most distinguished writers in the language.
The range of topics vary from historical (fiction and non fiction), to contemporary and embody both liberal and radical points of view. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Disasters both, each is alluded to here. The standard of writing is consistently high and stand-outs for me were Kazuo Ishiguru, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, Jeanette Winterson and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Everyone is here and this is a book you can pick up and put down at leisure. Just the best bedside book for this crisp season. Mike