Last month, a reformed Glaswegian gang member, a former personal trainer and a Booker prize winner all glammed up for a photoshoot. Graeme Armstrong, Derek Owusu and Eleanor Catton had never met before, but along with 17 other writers under the age of 40, they have been decreed the “Best of Young British Novelists” by the literary magazine Granta.
A selection of 20 authors every 10 years, the Granta list has become a barometer of the literary climate and a forecast of the stars of the future. The latest cohort join a roll call of literary giants from the particularly stellar 1983 list that included Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie; followed by, among others, Hanif Kureishi and Jeanette Winterson (1993); Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and David Mitchell (2003); and Kamila Shamsie and Sarah Hall (2013). As the list itself turns 40, it seems a timely moment to reflect on its influence and relevance: who’s in, who’s out – and what that says about the literary world.
The 31-year-old Airdrie-born Armstrong received 300 rejections before finding a publisher for his first novel, The Young Team, about Glasgow gang culture and written in Scottish vernacular (which makes fellow Scot Douglas Stuart’s 32 rejections for the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain seem a breeze). “I used to send stuff to anyone who is daft enough to put their email online – every agent, every publisher,” he says. “I’ve still got the email chains. One said: ‘It’s still a “no” this year, Graeme.’”
Were it not for a girl urging him to read Irvine Welsh when he was at school, he might not be here at all. “I don’t think I’d still be alive if I hadn’t read Trainspotting,” he says. “Three of my friends had just died of a heroin overdose. I was with one of the boys when it happened, I’d seen death right in the face. The book spoke to me in a very personal way. That’s what started it.” He spent 10 years writing the novel, while working 12-hour shifts six days a week as a car salesman. Being on the list is “surreal”, he says. “I also feel a responsibility to represent people.”
Owusu, who won the Desmond Elliott prize for his debut That Reminds Me, a coming-of-age novel about a boy born to Ghanaian parents growing up in Britain, hadn’t read a novel at all before he was 23. Then, after enrolling at university to study exercise science, he couldn’t stop. “I found my degree so easy, I just read literature the whole time. I was consumed with it,” he says. But it was only after a breakdown in his mid-20s that he started to write himself.
Other writers on the list include K Patrick, who lives on the Isle of Lewis and wrote much of their first novel Mrs S (published this summer) in three months, while working in a grocer’s during lockdown. “As somebody who identifies as trans-masculine, who’s written a book that probably wouldn’t have been published in 1983, it’s quite an astonishing thing,” they say of being on the list. Then there’s Natasha Brown, whose slim, acclaimed novel Assembly is a blistering portrait of sexism and racism in the financial sector where she worked for a decade; Tom Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, whose first novel, The New Life, set at the time of Oscar Wilde’s trial, has led to comparisons with Alan Hollinghurst (on the list in 1993); Saba Sams, winner of the BBC short story prize, whose debut collection of stories, Send Nudes, is a witty, intimate glimpse into messy twentysomething lives; and Olivia Sudjic, whose Sympathy and Asylum Road have been labelled the first great Instagram and Brexit novels, respectively.
Front row from left: Shiva Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Norman, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain and Lisa St Aubin de Terán. Photograph: Snowdon/Camera Press
“I think we should acknowledge that a different panel might easily have chosen a different group of novelists,” Granta editor and chair of the judging panel Sigrid Rausing writes in her introduction to the special issue. This year’s judges were novelists Rachel Cusk (who appeared on the 2003 list), Helen Oyeyemi (on the 2013 list), Tash Aw and essayist and critic Brian Dillon.
Back in 1983, Granta was edited by an American, Bill Buford, but the idea for a list of up-and-coming British writers was dreamed up in the bath by Desmond Clarke, who was head of the Book Marketing Council (it was the 80s). What started as a marketing wheeze became a serious statement about the state of contemporary British fiction and a cultural snapshot of a generation. With its pop-art cover, depicting two fountain pens splintering a union jack, that special edition of Granta ushered in an era when literature became “sexy”, as Julian Barnes described it, with attendant stories of heady advances, scandals and rivalries. Those bright young things – the closest the books world has come to rock stars – are now elder statesmen (and it is mostly men) in their 70s.
If the horizon for young writers was “uncluttered”, as McEwan put it, in a literary landscape presided over by elderly grandees such as William Golding, Iris Murdoch and Graham Greene, that is hardly the case today. Debut novels are big business, and lists of emerging talent have proliferated as enthusiastically as literary prizes (not to mention creative writing courses) in the intervening years, with young or debut writers often having categories of their own, such as the Dylan Thomas prize or the Women’s prize for writers under 35.
With 15 women, four men and one trans-masculine author, the new list confirms the big story of recent British writing – the decline of the Great White Male and the rise of Millennial Woman. On the 1983 list, there were six women and four writers of colour, including Buchi Emecheta. By 2013, women and writers from ethnically diverse backgrounds were in the majority. The class of 2023 also has an unusually non-metropolitan reach: the writers hail from destinations stretching from the Outer Hebrides to south Wales and the southern Irish coast (writer and artist Sara Baume was born in the UK). Ranging in age from 27 to 39, they fit almost exactly into the classification of “millennials”.
Sally Rooney – crowned “the first great millennial author” by the New York Times – is missing, of course, because she is Irish. “Is it possible to have a discussion of the novel in English on this side of the Atlantic and exclude the Irish?” asked Buford in 1983, who campaigned for Irish writing to be eligible on the Granta list as it is for most of the major literary prizes, including the Booker. His question seems only more pressing today when Irish writing has had such a resurgence.
Granta has changed the criteria this year to include not just writers who hold a British passport but those who “regard this country as their home”, which, on first glance, seems less straightforward. (In 2013, Kamila Shamsie was included, though she was waiting for British citizenship.) As Rausing explains: “We made the decision to be inclusive in the midst of the very inflamed debate on Brexit, and national identity (who is deemed to belong or not), and we wanted to widen the boundaries around the imagined community.”
As Granta says, this greatly opened eligibility to “many authors who … might not immediately scan as British”, such as the highest-profile writer on the list, New Zealander Eleanor Catton. Although she didn’t qualify back in 2013, when she became the youngest writer ever to win the Booker prize, Catton now lives in Cambridge. “It did feel a bit presumptuous,” she says, when her publisher (which happens to be Granta) asked if she wanted to be put forward for the list. “I had never been described as a British novelist before, nor had I ever described myself that way.” At that time, she couldn’t go home because New Zealand’s borders were closed due to the pandemic; reflecting on the cultural importance of freedom of movement and immigration, she decided that someone “living and writing in the UK should be able to be called a British novelist if they so chose”.
Catton’s most recent novel Birnam Wood takes a wry look at many of the issues raised by the current crop of new writing. “Although I do despair at a lot of millennial apathy and navel-gazing,” admits Catton, “these are the results of having been systematically disadvantaged and priced out of political and cultural life.”
Riven with economic, political and psychological uncertainties and peopled with characters who are alienated, anxious and adrift, often written in a fragmentary, sometimes plotless style, millennial fiction reflects the precariousness of the world in which the authors have grown up. The Iraq war, financial crashes, tuition fees, Brexit, Trump and most recently a global pandemic, not to mention the threat of environmental apocalypse – it is little wonder that the picture that emerges from these young writers’ work is a distinctly gloomy one.
Neither is it a surprise that many of them play fast and loose with form – they grew up writing with their thumbs. As Yara Rodrigues Fowler (author of Stubborn Archivist and also on the Granta list) says, only her dad uses full stops. There are few “social realist” writers, and those who are, tellingly, tend to favour historical novels, such as Crewe’s The New Life or The Parisian by Isabella Hammad.
Back row from left: Helen Simpson, Alan Hollinghurst, Tibor Fischer, Lawrence Norfolk, Adam Lively, Philip Kerr and Will Self. Middle row from left: Adam Mars-Jones, Candia McWilliam, Ben Okri, Louis de Bernières behind AL Kennedy and Esther Freud behind Caryl Phillips. Sitting on floor: Iain Banks (left) and Kazuo Ishiguro. Photograph: David Montgomery/Getty Images
There is a marked fondness for autofiction, blurring boundaries between real life and invention, and Cusk has been an important influence for many of these writers. “When I first read Outline, it completely changed the way I thought about writing,” says Sudjic. “It just felt natural to me,” says Owusu of his genre-defying books, “because my life, my worldview, my perspective, just the way I think, is by nature fragmented.”
There are plenty of other young British writers who might have been on the list: Caleb Azumah Nelson (Open Water), Sheena Patel (I’m a Fan) or Guy Gunaratne (In Our Mad and Furious City) for starters. As Rausing says, “the dividing line between those who ended up on the list and those who didn’t was very thin this year”. She was particularly sorry to lose Gabriel Krauze, AK Blakemore and Moses McKenzie. Eley Williams, who did make the list, and who is married to writer Nell Stevens, quips: “I’m not the best writer under 40 in my marriage.”
The age cut-off can seem another arbitrary border. Disproving Ishiguro’s oft-quoted maxim that a writer’s best work is done in their 30s, one of Granta’s most salutary omissions is surely Hilary Mantel, who didn’t embark on the Wolf Hall trilogy until she was in her late 50s. Jonathan Coe, one of Britain’s best comic novelists, missed out because What a Carve Up!, written in his early 30s, came out in 1994. Max Porter, 42 this year, suffers a similar fate as his hit debut Grief Is the Thing With Feathers was published in 2015. AS Byatt, a judge in 1993, who wrote her Booker-winning novel Possession in her 50s, argued that the age restriction does a disservice to women, who often begin writing when their children are older (Kate Atkinson and Tessa Hadley spring to mind).
As the list grew in stature, so it’s raison d’être shifted from showcasing young talent to seeking out and identifying promise, an altogether more slippery challenge. As Cyril Connolly observed, “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising,” and inevitably some writers fell by the wayside. Amis, Barnes and McEwan may not have been household names in 1983, but with a number of big hitters between them (The Rachel Papers, Metroland, The Cement Garden) they were fairly safe bets. Winterson had four novels under her belt by the time she appeared on the list in 1993, aged only 33, “so didn’t need the boost”, she says, but it would have made “a huge difference” if it had happened earlier in her career.
So what does their selection mean for this year’s authors – and what does it reveal about the publishing scene in general? Owusu, who edited an anthology of writing on Black British men, and presents the Penguin books podcast, worries that the momentum to acquire books by Black writers after the death of George Floyd in 2020 has not been sustained. He hopes that seeing his name on this new Granta list will remind publishers that writers from diverse backgrounds “do have something to offer. It’s not just about being able to tick boxes.”
Armstrong, who is white and working class, regards himself as part of a literary “Scottish resistance”. “We form our own rich tradition – Janice Galloway, Tom Lennard, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh: they were our idols, they spoke to our lives,” he says. “People say we only write about gangs or drugs in Scotland. That’s because they’re a social reality here, people struggle and there are levels of exclusion that we experience. So that’s where these stories come from.” As a northern writer from a working-class background, Eliza Clark feels similarly frustrated by the way writers from outside London are often portrayed. “Because publishing is so much the realm of the privileged, you end up in this situation where people like me – state-educated, white and live outside the M25 – it’s like: ‘Oh, you’re a novelty.’”
“I am less interested in increasing representation for its own sake,” says Rodrigues Fowler, who no longer describes herself as British Brazilian, partly because of political disillusionment with both countries. “I don’t think that diversity in terms of author identities is enough. It won’t give us real diversity of writing.” She was only able to write two novels before she was 30 because she moved home to live with her parents. “Unless people have the material conditions to write, then most groups are going to be excluded: young men who are working class but also women with kids. If writers aren’t paid better, you’re only going to see rich writers making work.”
“Of course it hasn’t been addressed enough,” K Patrick says of transgender representation in publishing. “I’m happy to be visible. I would never want to assume a position where I speak for all trans people, because I just don’t know what it’s like for everyone. But if me being on that list means that more trans people write books, then great! That’s a massive win.”
Of all the authors on the previous four lists, the writer who continues to resonate most strongly with the new generation is Zadie Smith, whose name comes up time and again in our conversations. For Clark, she was “the first of these young British female novelists who are now really dominating contemporary literature”.
As one of the few writers to have featured twice on the Granta list, first in 2003 and again in 2013, how does Smith herself feel about the influence of these kinds of lists? “I think it’s a rare writer who doesn’t need at least some public encouragement, and it’s certainly true that lists are useful for drawing attention towards young writers, all of whom now exist within an attention economy, and one that tends to be more focused on models and actors and so on,” she says. “But lists don’t make novels good: only novelists can do that. Personally, I never forgot that unclassifiable talents (such as JG Ballard) and hiding-in-plain-sight talents (such as Hilary Mantel) never let their absence from such lists slow them down or stop them from contributing, spectacularly, to that unbranded list called: literature. In short, be happy enough if you’re on one. Maybe make some friends at the photoshoot? But don’t worry too much if left off. And either way: get on with your work.”
• Granta 163: Best of Young British Novelists 5 will be published on 27 April.
