FESTIVAL FEATURES | Granta Writers SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
since 1983
E ach decade literary magazine, Granta, has published a list of the 20 British novelists under the age of 40 who they believe will do great things in the future. This year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival will celebrate the great and good of these lists, examining the legacies left behind and giving a chance to discover the upcoming generation.
While Granta’s line-ups are undoubtedly subjective, and swayed by prevailing fashions, the list does have an impressive hit rate for identifying names for the ages. Indeed since the i rst list in 1983, the addition of the likes of Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali and Ian McEwan, suggests that the writers picked for 2013 are surely ones to watch, with the talents of this year’s line-up, such as Sunjeev Sahota, Adam Thirlwell, Joanna Kavenna, Steven 18 THE LIST FESTIVAL 8–15 Aug 2013
Hall, Tahmima Anam, Jenni Fagan, and Helen Oyeyemi, already causing a stir far beyond the page. Sunjeev Sahota one of this year’s inclusions, has revealed that previous Granta listee Rushdie has been a massive inl uence on his work: Midnight’s Children was the i rst novel that Sahota, an 18-year-old maths student ever read. ‘It’s a very complex, ebulliently written book,’ Sahota has said. ‘What kept me turning the pages was the sense of a world of stories – of being immersed into someone’s mind.’
Steven Hall, another writer featured on the 2013 list, has been just as inl uenced by Rushdie, albeit for different reasons – a fact perhaps not so obvious to fans of his sharp, tricksy, consummately modern 2007 debut The Raw Shark Texts, published by Edinburgh’s Canongate. A work of redoubtable and
unapologetic scale, Midnight’s Children has become important to Hall, partly for structural reasons, as he works on a second book he fondly describes as ‘a monster’. ‘Reading Midnight’s Children has been a breath of fresh air for me,’ explains Hall, ‘not least because there seems to be a preoccupation with short, tidy, fast storytelling out there at the moment. I’ve fallen in love with epics – glorious sweeping stories that roam far and wide with unpredictable episodes, mid-novel character introductions and deaths, and multi-chapter side-wanderings. ‘Midnight’s Children takes its huge, magical, magnii cent time,’ Hall continues, ‘with no desire to pull itself so tight between plot points that you can see its machinery poking through. It’s a wonderful book. It makes me feel like I can breathe – and like the novel isn’t going to collapse into a 140 character singularity