The latest celebration of emerging literary talent brings thrills, charm and emotional punch to the page. But this new generation have taken an inward turn compared with the more worldly themes of bygone years
Every decade since 1983, an editor of the literary quarterly Granta has tasked a panel of writers and critics with naming the 20 best British novelists aged under 40. The first list, which included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, William Boyd and Graham Swift, defined the nation’s literary fiction not just for a generation but a lifetime, at least for anyone young enough to be eligible for this year’s selection. Subsequent lists had star quality, too. In 1993, Hanif Kureishi and Alan Hollinghurst. In 2003 came Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, listed when Brick Lane was still a manuscript. The 2013 list spotlit Ross Raisin, Evie Wyld and David Szalay, who each went on to publish exceptional novels, while Naomi Alderman won the Women’s prize for The Power, now a hit TV series. If nobody talks them up as a golden generation, it probably says less about their calibre as writers and more about the diminishing clout of a marketing wheeze dreamed up when four-channel TV was still a novelty.
The class of 2023 are a rangy bunch with some fantastic writing already under their belts. Eley Williams brings emotional punch to tickled wordplay. The slow-burn thrill of Eleanor Catton’s many-tentacled plotting. The tragicomic charm of Welsh short story writer Thomas Morris. Derek Owusu’s wrenching excavations of filial strife, close-to-the-bone disclosures in multilingual shards. Yet for some reason Granta’s heart doesn’t seem entirely in it. “I never have much faith in lists in any case,” warns the magazine’s owner and current editor, Sigrid Rausing, explaining that another set of judges might have chosen another 20 writers. Well, sure! All the more reason to put a bit of welly behind the ones you did pick. (Ian Jack, doing this job in 2003, was also ambivalent, true, with good cause: when three of the authors chosen under his watch turned out at the last moment to be ineligible, three others sidelined as “quite good” became “best” – a demonstration, he wrote, of the “arbitrariness of literary lists”, given as “comfort to those who fail to get on them, and a caution to those who do”.) Continue reading...
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