Granta’s class of 2013: picking the 20 best young British novelists

Howls of outrage are bound to accompany next month’s unveiling of Granta’s list of top 20 young writers. Here a former Granta editor and veteran of the 2003 judging panel reveals how the list takes shape.

By Alex Clark

Ten years is a long time in the literary game: it can easily take someone until then to finish writing a decent novel – although that’s less and less likely to wash with contemporary publishers. But a decade is also more than enough time for a writer’s fortunes to change dramatically.

Take Hilary Mantel. In 2003 she was a highly respected novelist and critic, the author of such enthusiastically reviewed novels as Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, The Giant, O’Brien and A Place of Greater Safety, the epic fictional portrayal of the French revolution published a decade previously that had probably been her most widely read novel. In the spring of 2003 her extraordinary memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, came out. But Beyond Black, her macabre novel of psychic shenanigans in the home counties, was still two years away; and we would have to wait several more before Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies would scoop two Man Booker prizes and transport Mantel to the highest echelons of writerly fame. Ten years ago she was the very emblem of the seriously talented and audacious female writer who was somehow rarely mentioned in the same breath as the holy trinity of Amis, Barnes and McEwan. Now, she cannot express a mildly contentious view in a literary journal without waking to find an outraged press pack camped on her front lawn.

Both scenarios are mad, and flipsides of the same issue. The pigheaded undervaluing of certain writers and the overnight obsession with others suggest problems with scale and perspective; problems that are perhaps related to Jonathan Franzen’s analysis of the trappings that come with mega-successful authorship.

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The best love poems: writers choose their favourites – interactive

  By Paddy Allen

Lustful gazing, unrequited yearning and passionate wooing – AS Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson and many others pick the poems that stole their hearts. Plus Carol Ann Duffy writes a new poem for the occasion. Click on the images to read the poems

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A life in writing: Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett … AS Byatt is a fan, calling him 'a great storyteller, and splendidly inventive with the English language'. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

‘I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet’.

By Alison Flood

Terry Pratchett is having a statue made. It’s a statue of a goddess, and he thinks she ought probably to be smoking a cigarette, and to be showing one breast. “There should be an urn, too. If there’s an urn it’s not porn – that’s a Discworld cliché,” he says, a bubble of laughter in his voice.

The goddess is one of Pratchett’s own invention: Narrativia, the deity of narrative who smiles on writers (and perhaps especially sunnily on her creator). Discworld, created by Pratchett 28 years ago, is the fantasy world held up by four elephants balanced on the back of a giant turtle. It’s a concept which started out as an affectionate lampoon of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy genre, but it has, over the years, become an increasingly sophisticated swipe at contemporary society, pointing out the ridiculousness of everything from Hollywood to the postal service, newspapers, banks and football.

And Narrativia has been beside him all the way. “If you’ve been a good boy and worked at what you’re doing, then the goddess Narrativia will smile on you,” he says, recounting his delight at a particular piece of her work, when he was writing Thief of Time more than a decade ago. He decided to call one of his characters Ronnie Soak. Soak is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse – the one who left before they got famous. His name was picked at random, so Pratchett was astonished when he noticed what it sounded like backwards. Suddenly, he knew of what this particular horseman would be a harbinger. “I thought chaos – yes! Chaos, the oldest,” he says. “Stuff just turns up like that.”

In typically ebullient fashion, Thief of Time also contains a sprinkling of yetis, a clock which will stop time and the Monks of History, whose job it is to manage time, moving it from where it isn’t needed (underwater) to where it is (cities). AS Byattsaid on the book’s publication that it should have been nominated for the Booker prize. But it was a fantasy novel; it was funny; it was a bestseller. Unsurprisingly enough, it wasn’t.And despite Pratchett’s immense popularity (75 million copies sold of his 67 books), it took a while for the literary establishment to notice – apart from Byatt.

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Ragnarök: the doom of the gods

This Norse saga of the gods destroying themselves is the perfect allegory for 21st-century environmental catastrophe.

By AS Byatt

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Myth comes from muthos in Greek, something said, as opposed to something done. We think of myths as stories, although, as Heather O’Donoghue says in her book From Asgard to Valhalla, there are myths that are not essentially narratives at all. We think of them loosely as tales that explain, or embody, the origins of our world. Karen Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myths that myths are ways of making things comprehensible and meaningful in human terms (the sun as a chariot driven by a woman through the firmament) and that they are almost all “rooted in death and the fear of extinction”.

Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, sees myths as dreamlike shapes and tales constructed by the Apollonian principle of order and form to protect humans against the apprehension of the Dionysian states of formlessness, chaos and gleeful destruction. Tragedy controls the primeval force of music by presenting us with beautiful illusory forms of gods, demons, men and women, through whom apprehension is bearable and possible. He wrote: “Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.”

Nietzsche’s heroes were Aeschylus and Sophocles, whose characters are mythic beings. He did not approve of Euripides, who tried to humanise the actors in these stories, give them individual “characters” and personalities.

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I’m an Orange prize convert – for all the wrong reasons

Women writers are failing as much as ever to win the recognition they deserve, so they need the publicity the award brings.

By Jean Hannah Edelstein

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I’ve never been a huge fan of the Orange prize. I’ve liked many of the books nominated, and I’ve enjoyed the awards ceremony because after the winners are ushered on to the stage with a burst of thumping, triumphant power chords, which is delightful. But on the question of whether the prize should exist at all, I have always agreed with AS Byatt that it was sexist. “It assumes there is a feminine subject matter,” she said.

 So why, this year, have I changed my mind? The past year or so has been a bad one for women writers. Not for writing produced by women. As always, lots of it has been excellent (and some has been terrible, much like the writing produced by men). It’s been a bad year for women writers because it has become more apparent than ever that they are failing to receive the recognition they deserve.

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Mantel on Sunday Times short story longlist

Graeme Neill

Man Booker winner Hilary Mantel and Susan Hill are among the writers longlisted for the £30,000 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011.

Alongside the better-known authors, the longlist, which also features Michel Faber and Tibor Fischer, includes former bus conductor Fabian Ackler and actor and puppeteer Erin Soros. The prize is open to authors of previously unpublished work or stories first published after 1st January 2010. The shortlist will be announced on 13th March and the winner revealed at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on 8th April. Each shortlisted author will receive £500.                                                                                 …read more