Granta

Continuing our series of podcasts on the Best of Young British Novelists 4, we hear from Steven Hall. Born in Derbyshire, Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, won the Borders Original Voices Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’, in the issue, are excerpts from his upcoming second novel, The End of Endings. Here he spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about how the internet is, to his mind, disturbing the possibility of a novel with a single continuous narrative thread, writing from memory and the significance of Ian the cat in his first novel.

Continuing our series of podcasts on the Best of Young British Novelists 4, we hear from Jenni Fagan. Fagan’s critically acclaimed debut novel, The Panopticon, was published in 2012 and named one of the Waterstones Eleven, a selection of the best fiction debuts of the year. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her collection The Dead Queen of Bohemia was named 3:AM magazine’s Poetry Book of the Year. She holds an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and currently lives in a coastal village in Scotland. ‘Zephyrs’, in the issue, is an excerpt from her novel in progress. Here she speaks with Granta’s Ellah Allfrey about the care system, how a library van nurtured her love of reading from a young age and her days in a band.

Continuing our Best of Young British Novelists we hear from Kamila Shamsie. Shamsie is the author of five novels. The first, In the City by the Sea, was published by Granta Books in 1998 and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her most recent novel, Burnt Shadows, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and translated into more than twenty languages. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a trustee of English PEN and a member of the Authors Cricket Club. ‘Vipers’, in the issue, is an excerpt from a forthcoming novel. Here she talks to John Freeman about the themes of love and war in her work, moving between her native Karachi and London where she lives now, her choice to become a UK citizen and how her uncle directed the first episode of Doctor Who.

Ross Raisin’s first novel, God’s Own Country, about a disturbed adolescent living in the Yorkshire Dales, won him the 2009 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Guardian First Book Award, a Betty Trask Award and numerous other prizes. His second novel, Waterline, about a former shipbuilder grieving the death of his wife in Glasgow, was published to critical acclaim in 2011. His short stories have been published in Prospect, Esquire, Dazed & Confused, the Sunday Times, on BBC Radio 3 and in Granta. In this podcast, he spoke to Yuka Igarashi about how he evokes place and inhabits characters in his writing; the difference between his approaches to short stories and novels; and what it means to him to be part of the Best Young British Novelist list. He also discusses his work on a new novel, which began as a story published in Granta: Britain.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Nadifa Mohamed. Mohamed was born in Somalia and moved to Britain in 1986. Here she spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about how her first novel, Black Mamba Boy (which won the Betty Trask Award), was inspired by her father’s journey to the UK from Somalia, and how that process brought them closer together. They also spoke about her arrival from Somalia, growing up in Tooting and how she believed from a young age that cats were spies for the government. ‘Filsan’, in the issue, is an excerpt from her new novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US. You can also watch a specially commissioned short film in which Mohamed visits Shepherd’s Bush Market and explains why she wants to be the griot of London.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Sunjeev Sahota. Sahota was born in Derby and currently lives in Leeds with his wife and daughter. His first novel, Ours are the Streets, was published in 2011. ‘Arrivals’, in the issue, is an excerpt from The Year of the Runaways, his unfinished second novel, forthcoming from Picador. Here Sahota spoke to Ellah Allfrey about his work, finding Midnight’s Children in an airport bookshop and having a day job.

Benjamin Markovits is the author of six books: The Syme Papers, Either Side of Winter and Playing Days as well as a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron — Imposture, A Quiet Adjustment, and Childish Loves. He is also the only Granta Best of Young Novelists who is known to be able to dunk. In this podcast with Yuka Igarashi, he discusses his time playing minor-league basketball for a team in southern Germany, and the ways in which this and his other experiences inform his work as a writer. He also talks about his new novel, extracted in the issue, about a group of university friends who get involved in a scheme to regenerate Detroit.

In our latest instalment of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, we speak to Helen Oyeyemi. Oyeyemi is the author of The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House. Her third novel, White is for Witching, was awarded a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, and her fourth, Mr Fox, won the 2012 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Award. ‘Boy, Snow, Bird’, in the issue, is an excerpt from a new novel of the same title, published in 2014 by Picador in the UK and Riverhead in the US. Here Oyeyemi spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about the joys of writing from a male perspective, the role of magic in her work, some of her influences from Alfred Hitchcock to Jeanette Winterson and how as a young girl she would write alternate endings in the margins of the classics.

Our latest instalment of podcasts for our Best of Young British Novelist features Adam Thirlwell. Thirlwell is the author of the novels Politics and The Escape, the novella Kapow!, and a project with international novels that includes an essay-book, Miss Herbert and a compendium of translations edited for McSweeney’s. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists back in 2003. Here she spoke to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about sex, history, translation, using tempo in novels and how his writing has evolved over the past decade.

In our latest installment of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, we speak to Sarah Hall. Hall was born in Cumbria and lives in Norwich. She is the multiple-prize-winning author of four novels: Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army (published in the US as Daughters of the North) and How to Paint a Dead Man; a collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, original radio dramas and poetry. Here she spoke to Granta’s Saskia Vogel about wolves, tattoos and the wilds of Cumbria.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Xiaolu Guo. Guo studied at the Beijing Film Academy and received her MA from the National Film School in London. She has published seven novels in both English and Chinese. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her other novels include UFO in Her Eyes and 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. She directed the award-winning films, She, a Chinese and Once Upon a Time Proletrian. 'Interim Zone', in the issue, is an excerpt from I Am China, her new novel forthcoming from Chatto & Windus in the UK. Here she spoke to deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about her experience of growing up in rural China, her move to writing in English and becoming an East Ender.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with David Szalay. Szalay was born in Canada; his family moved to the UK soon after, and he has lived here ever since. He has published three novels: London and the South-East, The Innocent and Spring. He is currently working on a number of new projects –‘Europa’, which appears in the issue, is an excerpt from one of these. He spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about how spending time in Hungary paradoxically makes it easier to write about London, his years trying to live off betting on horses and how memory informs his work.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Joanna Kavenna. Kavenna grew up in various parts of Britain and has also lived in the US, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States. She is the author of three novels: Inglorious, The Birth of Love and Come to the Edge, and one work of non-fiction, The Ice Museum. In 2008 she was awarded the Orange Prize for New Writing. ‘Tomorrow’, which appears in the issue, is an excerpt from a forthcoming novel. Here she spoke to deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about her incurable wander-lust, genre-hopping and why Nietzsche was wrong about the ordinary man.

In the latest Granta Podcast we bring you an interview with Best of Young British Novelist, Naomi Alderman. Described by Rachel Seiffert as ‘someone who can do funny’, Alderman is the author of three novels: Disobedience, The Lessons and The Liars’ Gospel. She writes and designs computer games and is co-creator of Zombies, Run!, the best-selling iPhone fitness game and audio adventure. A professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University, she has been paired with Margaret Atwood in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Here, Alderman speaks to deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about her engagement with the world around her and the joys of writing to genre. ‘Soon and in Our Days’, which is published in the issue, is a new story.

Continuing a series of podcasts featuring our Best of Young British Novelists, today we bring you an interview with Taiye Selasi. Selasi was born in London to Nigerian and Ghanaian parents. She made her fiction debut in Granta in 2011 with ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’, which was selected for Best American Short Stories in 2012. Her first novel, Ghana Must Go, was published in March 2013. Here she spoke to deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about her mother’s garden, Rachmaninov and learning to speak Italian.

Continuing a series of podcasts on our Best of Young British Novelists 4, today we bring you an interview with Evie Wyld. Wyld’s first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, which follows the lives of two men, Frank and Leon, who live decades apart but on the same wild coastline in Queensland, Australia, and was shortlisted for numerous awards and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award. Her second novel All the Birds, Singing, is excerpted in the issue. Here Wyld talks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why living in Peckham makes it easier to write about rural Australia, how memory informs her stories and why she can’t write a novel without at least one shark in it.

Best of Young British Novelist Adam Foulds, the author of two novels including Booker shortlisted The Quickening Maze and the Costa Book Award winning narrative poem The Broken Word, spoke to John Freeman about how he wanted to be a scientist before discovering writing, his time working in a warehouse as a forklift truck driver, why his work often focuses on moments of existential crisis and the English teachers who encouraged his writing and were surprised to receive a hefty manuscript shortly afterwards.

James Lasdun talks about his most recent memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, about being stalked by a fomer writng student.

Colin Robinson reads from his memoir 'Paddleball' in Granta 122: Betrayal and discusses how an old brotherly friction re-emerged during a game in New York, and how gym culture has changed the way we see our bodies. 

The author of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist', Mohsin Hamid, talks to John Freeman about the extract from his latest novel 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia', extracted in the new issue of Granta, Betrayal.