The story of Granta begins in 1889, when students at Cambridge University founded a periodical of politics, jokes, and literary ambition named after the river that runs through town. In that first incarnation, it published the early work of A. A. Milne, E. M. Forster, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath. By the 1970s, it was nearly dead — no money, no contributors, no readers. Then, in 1979, an American postgraduate named Bill Buford and his colleague Peter de Bolla rescued it, transforming a moribund student magazine into a quarterly journal of new writing that drew contributors from around the world.
Buford's first issue was devoted to New American Writing and featured Paul Auster and Susan Sontag. It sold eight hundred copies, which surprised everyone. Over the next sixteen years as editor, he turned Granta into one of the most respected literary magazines on earth, publishing Gabriel García Márquez, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Hanif Kureishi. In 1983, the magazine published its first Best of Young British Novelists list — a decennial tradition that has since become one of the most consequential acts of literary curation in the English-speaking world. At least twelve of its selections have gone on to win or be shortlisted for major literary prizes. The magazine has now published twenty-seven Nobel Prize laureates in total.
In 1989, Buford founded Granta Books with Penguin, launching with John Berger, Martha Gellhorn, and Gabriel García Márquez. The publisher Sigrid Rausing acquired Granta in 2005 and in 2019 converted the magazine into a charitable trust dedicated to promoting new and emerging writing. Today, Granta publishes quarterly in its distinctive paperback-book format — fiction, memoir, reportage, poetry, and photography — with editions in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and other languages. As The Observer once wrote, the magazine has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world. After more than 130 years, it has not looked away.
<a href="https://granta.com/">Visit Granta