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Interview: William Boyd on Granta 100
March 18, 2008

Novelist William Boyd spoke to me from his home in England about the experience he had guest-editing Granta 100 -- the 100th issue of the ground-breaking literary magazine that began in 1979 when "a young American graduate revived an old Cambridge university magazine and created a home for good writing of all kinds—reportage, fiction, memoir, biography—as well as photography and, occasionally, poetry." 

                                                               

Boyd told me the process was less a selection than "seeing who I could get." Of course, Boyd being Boyd, those he "could get" include Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, Hanif Kureishi, Helen Simpson, Ian McEwan, and Martin Amis. (Not to mention David Hockney for the cover... )

What is it about Granta that makes it such an "easy decision," as Boyd terms it, for these writers? "It's so different; its book shape makes you want to pick it up!" he said. "But that's not all of it, of course. The length that Granta offers is something we don't often get over here. In Britain we don't have The New Yorker."

Granta's renown still lives on, he says: "It's a milestone, still, to be published in Granta." He believes that the younger writers he approached, like Helen Oyeyemi and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, were "thrilled and pleased" to be asked. 

More established writers were still pleased, but sometimes had interesting ideas. "I know Ian McEwan, so I told him he had complete carte blanche," says Boyd. "He thought for a moment, and then said, 'Would you be interested in a libretto?'" The answer? "For You," the first and perhaps only complete McEwan libretto, appears in Granta 100. 

However star-studded a literary magazine is, the question has to be asked: what is the future of text-based art in a visual age? "I never worry about the doom-and-gloom merchants," says Boyd. "The novel is the best art form to describe the human condition. As long as we are curious about other people, we'll be writing fiction. The novel does its job perfectly."

Boyd also feels that "Good artists, writing well, will always attract an audience. Look at Granta 100 -- there's nt one dud piece in it! What you see is really talented, gifted writers, really strutting their stuff. This is the artistic elite, with nothing of the journeyman in it. No one here writes with a pen of brass."

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on March 18, 2008 | Comments (2)