Granta Trust

The Granta Trust is the charitable foundation that runs the leading literary quarterly Granta.

Relaunched in 1979, Granta publishes new work from established writers alongside unknown and emerging voices, including work in translation. Each edition of the magazine features a mix of fiction, reportage, memoir, poetry and photography. In its early years, Granta served as a critical go-between for transatlantic literary culture in a time before the internet allowed English and American writers to readily compare notes on literary developments. Today Granta – with a much wider, global readership – fulfils a more central mission for the literary world: it exhibits the writing of the future, much of which finds its way into book form years later.

Granta publishes, on average, some eighty writers a year in print, and one-hundred-and-sixty in its online edition. In 2023, thirty of them were new talents, or new to an English-speaking audience. We feature at least two photo essays per issue, with many more appearing on Granta.com. The editorial team’s close collaboration with translators ensures that Granta enjoys a wide geographical reach. Granta takes pride in working with writers and photographers from all backgrounds and communities. Writing rarely provides a stable income, which makes it difficult for writers without sufficient means to develop their craft and establish important connections. Granta has a long history of finding and publishing under-represented voices, and providing young writers with a platform where they can be discovered by agents, publishers, and, most importantly, readers.

Past contributors whose careers have been developed by the magazine include Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Ford, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Svetlana Alexievich and Binyavanga Wainaina, among many others. Our ‘Best of Young’ issues, released decade by decade, introduce the most important voices of each generation – in Britain, America, Brazil and Spain – and define the contours of the literary landscape.

In 2023, as part of Granta’s mission to support new writers, we started a programme of writing workshops with our education partners, Professional Writing Academy. The Granta Writers’ Workshops are designed to help writers to improve their technical skills in a supportive and stimulating environment. Bursary-funded places are available on each course for those in financial need – so far, 40 per cent of the awards have gone to writers with a disability, and 60 per cent of the recipients are from the Global South. The courses are oversubscribed, and places are awarded on a competitive basis to writers showing exceptional promise.

Part of the success of the magazine is reflected by the fact that writers first published in Granta frequently go on to win prizes – in the past year alone contributions to Granta have won, or been shortlisted, for the O. Henry Prize, the BBC National Short Story Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Best of the Net prize. This year’s contributors to the magazine have won or been nominated for the Nobel Prize, the Booker Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the Gordon Burn Prize.

The magazine currently has a circulation of 23,000. We produce a regular, critically-acclaimed podcast, while Granta.com, our online platform, records more than 350,000 pageviews monthly. In addition to reaching a worldwide audience directly, we also offer institutional subscriptions, which give students across the globe access to our archive. The physical archive of Granta, which includes valuable editorial correspondence with our writers, is held by the British Library.

Few literary magazines are able to thrive without external funding. The income from our endowment and from subscriptions, advertising and courses cover only a part of our costs. Without the generosity of individuals and organisations such as the Ford Foundation and the British Council, Granta would be unable to fulfil its mission of being the leading literary quarterly in the English-speaking world.

By giving to Granta Trust you help to publish new writers from all over the world, enable journalists to write long-form reportage that uncovers corruption and promotes justice, as well as develop the diversity and sustainability of the literary landscape. We hope that you will consider supporting us in this vital work.