Like all the best secret missions, this one started
with an email. In early February 2013 I was approached by the literary director
of The British Council about a top secret project in partnership with Granta magazine.
The mission – if I chose to accept it – was to read Granta’s new
2013 Best of Young British (BOYB) list and create a set of teaching materials
for The British Council designed for delivery in universities across the world
to promote the teaching of contemporary literature.
The British Council is the UK’s leading
cultural relations organisation. The Literature department works with writers,
publishers, producers, translators and other sector professionals across
literature, publishing and education to develop innovative, high-quality
literary programmes and collaborations that provide opportunities for cultural
exchange and mutual understanding at festivals, book fairs, conferences,
workshops and standalone events around the world.
Granta is the quarterly magazine featuring the best new writing from
around the world. It was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge
University as The Granta, a periodical of student politics, student
badinage and student literary enterprise, named after the river that runs
through the town. During the 1970s, it was re-launched with ten
international editions of the magazine in countries including Brazil, Norway
and China. Best of Young British Novelists lists were
published in 1983, 1993 and 2003. Best of Young American Novelists were
published in 1996 and 2007. In 2010, Granta 113: The Best
of Young Spanish-Language Novelists was released, marking the first
time in history that Granta’s Best of Young Novelists series looked
outside the English-speaking world. Granta 121: The
Best of Young Brazilian Novelists launched in 2012. Granta does
not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the
power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the
story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real.
In partnership, The British Council and Granta wanted
to commission a set of teaching materials based on the 2013 BOYB list,
comprising two 90 minute lectures and powerpoints, twenty seminars and an
introductory document. I chose to accept the mission. In six weeks, I would
read twenty novels and write these materials on top of my own teaching, subject
leading and the running of a new research centre. Somehow, it happened.
In early February, Granta called from a sealed room
somewhere in London and read out the secret list with an even more secret set of
rules. Each author on the list had been assigned a special number to avoid anyone
intercepting the names on the list. I was not to communicate these authors or texts to anyone,
or refer to them by name. I would deliver the teaching materials before the 15th April
launch where I would meet the authors and hear the list announced live on BBC
Radio Four.
In late February, I took delivery of twenty closely guarded novels from Foyles
and began to slowly work my way through the towering pile. But with a growing sense of paranoia, and a number of press articles about my ‘secret’ project emerging, I
became wary of keeping all twenty texts in a pile together (see pic below) and even of reading them on trains or in the office (too many literary
colleagues). So the novels became scattered across my flat, turning my home into
a Granta BOYB-style treasure hunt, and were largely read in the library, to
ensure the list stayed as secret as possible.
Reading the novels was probably my favourite part of this whole ‘job’.
When do you ever get the chance to sit down and read twenty of the best new
works in British fiction? Everyone should read a whole Granta BOYB list once in their lives, maybe just not in three weeks! Writing the materials proved harder –
drawing together themes from twenty novels into one lecture, and a sweep of
developments in C21 literature in another, proved a huge challenge. C21
literature is slippery by nature, resistant to catagorisation and enjoys
playing at the edges of boundaries, thematic or otherwise. The texts of the
2013 BOYB are gloriously fluid and diverse and I hope this is something
captured in the final teaching materials.
The announcement of the list at The British Council in London on 15th April
2013 was a great (and hugely oversubscribed) event, that united publishers,
authors, publicists and staff from Granta. While the list was read
out by Granta’s editor, there was a real sense of beginnings, of
how these individuals would shape representations of the coming time and the world around us. As a
celebration of the relevance of the novel form and the health of new writing,
the launch party acted as a timely reminder of the vitality of British
literature in the new millennium.
Everyone can pick up the 2013 BOYB novels
and be guaranteed an amazing reading experience. I would like to thank
Doug at The British Council and Saskia at Granta for offering
support and Twitter-based enthusiasm for the duration of my secret mission.
Hopefully the teaching materials will bring these texts to a host of new places and open them up to readers around the world. Granta and
The British Council have done a fantastic job in collating the writers who will
define the next ten years. As the authors head off around the globe and Granta takes
to the road in the UK, watch out for the 2013 BOYB coming to a town or country
near you soon. Mission accomplished.
