Based in London and published four times a year throughout the world, Granta magazine features new writing—fiction, personal history, reportage and inquiring journalism—and original documentary photography. Every issue contains at least 256 pages in paperback book format; special issues, such as those on India, London and Africa, are longer.

Granta 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. In this original incarnation it had a long and distinguished history, publishing the early work of many writers who later became well known, including A. A. Milne, Michael Frayn, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. During the 1970s, it ran into trouble—dwindling money, mounting apathy—from which it was rescued by a small group of postgraduates who successfully and surprisingly relaunched it as a magazine of new writing, with both writers and their audience drawn from the world beyond Cambridge.

Since 1979, the year of its rebirth, Granta has published many of the world's finest writers tackling some of the world's most important subjects, from intimate human experiences to the large public and political events that have shaped our lives. Its contributors have included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Peter Carey, Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton, Richard Ford, Martha Gellhorn, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Jayne Anne Phillips, Salman Rushdie, George Steiner, Graham Swift, Paul Theroux, Edmund White, Jeanette Winterson and Tobias Wolff. Every issue since 1979 is still in print. Some of them—'Travel' (Granta 10) and 'The Family' (Granta 37), for example—have found a place in the recent history of literature. In the pages of Granta, readers met for the first time the narrative prose of writers such as Bill Bryson, Romesh Gunesekera, Blake Morrison, Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith; and have encountered events and topics as diverse as the fall of Saigon, the mythology of the Titanic, adultery, psychotherapy and the sounds that chickens make.

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. The London Observer wrote of Granta: 'In its blend of memoirs and photojournalism, and in its championing of contemporary realist fiction, Granta has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world.' This commitment means that it rarely publishes reviews or essays or other forms of writing about writing. Also, it rarely publishes poetry. There are few other restrictions, other than that pieces which appear in Granta must not have been published before in English.

It is a magazine, alive to the present, and not a conventional literary anthology.

—Ian Jack, Editor