Women and visions of the future dominate the 2023 Granta list

Like a hybrid solar eclipse, literary magazine Granta’s list of the 20 most promising British novelists under 40 have been rolling around every 10 years since 1983.

This year’s luminaries — of whom 15 are women — include Elanor Catton whose second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making her the youngest author ever to win the prize (at age 28) and only the second New Zealander. Other established writers include Sara Baume, author of the novels Spill Simmer Falter Wither, A Line Made by Walking and Seven Steeples, Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy and Asylum Road (2021), and Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure (longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, Blue Ticket, and Cursed Bread (2023).

K Patrick is Granta’s first trans-masculine writer, shortlisted in 2021 for both the White Review Poetry and Short Story Prize. Their debut novel, Mrs S, will be published in June 2023 and speaks to their sensibilities as a poet.

There are just two black writers on the list: Derek Owusu and Natasha Brown. Owusu is a writer, podcaster, and editor of Ghanaian descent. Best known for his debut novel, That Reminds Me (2019), and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction, his contributions to literature are notable for exploring themes of identity, race, mental health, and masculinity. In That Reminds Me, he tells the story of a young black man named K who is struggling to find his place in the world after growing up in foster care.

He co-edited Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space, an anthology of essays exploring the experiences of black British men, and he has served as a mentor for young writers. He has become an important voice in contemporary British literature, amplifying the stories and perspectives of marginalised communities.

Brown was a 2019 London Writers Award recipient, a 2022 Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, and a Women’s Prize x Good Housekeeping Futures Award finalist. Assembly (2021), her debut novel, is a sharp critique of class and race relations in Britain.

“Is the novel’s future white and female?”, The Telegraph’s headline asked in a commentary that noted that most of the people who commission, edit and promote fiction are white women, and that young male writers have given up on writing literary fiction: “They see more possibilities — and, crucially, money — in genre fiction, narrative nonfiction and TV scriptwriting. The result has been that women have claimed the novel as their form, and now write with the self-assurance that male writers had in the 20th century.”

The list is whiter even than the class of 1983, which included Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro. That list was considered generation-defining because it was the first time that a literary magazine had made a definitive selection of the most promising young writers in Britain. It had been compiled by a panel of judges that included Granta’s then editor, Bill Buford, and some established writers of the time. The judges were looking for young writers who were not only talented but also represented a new wave of British literature that was breaking away from the traditional realist style of the past.

All of these writers went on to become important voices in contemporary British literature, and many of them have won major literary awards for their work. Subsequent lists have included Zadie Smith, Iain Banks, Nicola Barker, Ben Okri, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Sarah Waters and Rachel Cusk.

The 2023 selection, which took more than two years to bring together, was judged by authors Cusk, Helen Oyeyemi, Tash Aw and Brian Dillon, chaired by editor Sigrid Rausing, from a longlist compiled by the Granta editorial team.

According to Granta, the latest list suggests an emerging literary culture that more fully represents British society as a whole, including authors who have chosen to live in the UK. A number of writers explore their own working class backgrounds. Most conspicuously, the list is no longer centred in London. Dispersed across the UK, and writing often about remote locations, the writers originate from Sydney, Montreal, London, Edinburgh, the Isle of Lewis, North Lanarkshire, Cardiff, Birmingham, Newcastle, Lancashire and New Zealand.

Contrary to the millennial stereotype, they largely shun internet culture, choosing more self-conscious, intricate prose, and preferring “grander presentations of self, society and ecology”.

“If this generation has a theme, I would say it’s pollution, in the largest sense — both to do with the destruction or degradation of nature and urban environments, but also the taint of connectivity, the pervasive sense of perceiving other minds and bodies as a threat,” said Rausing. 

“There is no particular sense, to me, of the ‘woke’ moment on this list, but rather a subterranean sense of uncertainty, of creative minds mistrusting not experimentation, exactly, but the anarchic exuberance of experimentation,” she said.

Writing in a time of anxiety, this diverse generation is strikingly unified in one respect: all are interested in experimental visions of the future. Granta 163 showcases a consistent, forward-looking drive — the search for new possibilities, new alternatives, new hope.

The Ganta 2023 list

• Eleanor Catton, Kiwi author of Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries and Birnam Wood 
• Derek Owusu, author of Desmond Elliott prize-winning novel That Reminds Me and Losing the Plot
• K Patrick, a debut novelist and author of Mrs S
• Graeme Armstrong, debut Scottish novelist and author of The Young Team
• Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy and Asylum Road
• Sophie Mackintosh, author of Women’s prize longlist title Cursed Bread 
• Anna Metcalfe, author of story collection Blind Water Pass and novel Chrysalis
• Natasha Brown, author of Assembly 
• Tom Crewe, debut novelist and author of The New Life 
• Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts and the forthcoming Penance and She’s Always Hungry 
• Sara Baume, author of Seven Steeples
• Isabella Hammad, author of Palestinian Hamlet retelling Enter Ghost
• Yara Rodrigues Fowler, author of Stubborn Archivist and Goldsmiths prize shortlisted There Are More Things
• Lauren Aimee Curtis, Sydney-born author of Dolores and the forthcoming Strangers at the Port
• Eley Williams, author of story collection Attrib. and Betty Trask award-winning novel The Liar’s Dictionary
• Saba Sams, author of short story collection Send Nudes
• Thomas Morris, author of We Don’t Know What We’re Doing
• Camilla Grudova, author of short story collection The Doll’s Alphabet and novel Children of Paradise
• Jennifer Atkins, author of The Cellist