Granta unveils Best Young American Novelists

Richard Lea
Monday March 5, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Granta magazine has unveiled its second list of the best young American novelists - a mixture of authors already familiar on this side of the Atlantic, such as Guardian first book award winners Jonathan Safran Foer and Yiyun Li, and those tipped to become so.

The 2007 list, published 11 years after Granta's original American selection, lowers the age for qualification as a "young novelist" from 40 to 35. "People seem to be writing (and publishing) fiction sooner," explains the editor of Granta, Ian Jack "... they have, at least in theory, a head start on their predecessors and should be getting better, quicker."

In his introduction to a collection of their stories to be published by Granta on April 24 in the US and May 10 in the UK, Jack points to a change in tone since the 1996 list.

Writers' interest in social class has "ebbed", he says, and in its place is a concern with death, uncertainty and the outside world.

Nearly all of the writers on the list have attended creative writing courses, lending support to Jack's observation that writing fiction is "increasingly seen as a career choice by Americans in their early twenties, who attend universities to learn it".

Christopher Coake, one of seven on this year's list who have yet to publish a novel, described himself on his weblog as being "honoured ... humbled ... and still more or less in disbelief".

It remains to be seen how the class of 2007 will compare to illustrious forebears such as Jonathan Franzen, David Guterson and Jeffrey Eugenides.

The full list of novelists recognised on the list is:

Daniel Alarcón
Kevin Brockmeier
Judy Budnitz
Christopher Coake
Anthony Doerr
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Olga Grushin
Dara Horn
Gabe Hudson
Uzodinma Iweala
Nicole Krauss
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Yiyun Li
Maile Meloy
ZZ Packer
Jess Row
Karen Russell
Akhil Sharma
Gary Shteyngart
John Wray