In 1983 Granta devoted an entire issue to new fiction by twenty of the 'Best of Young British Novelists'. It did the same again in 1993 and 2003. These lists were revealing snapshots of three generations of writers about to come into their own. In the introduction to the 2003 list Ian Jack wrote:

'The idea behind each [list] has been to recognize twenty British writers under the age of forty who have showed exceptional promise or achievement, and to introduce the lesser-known among them to a wider audience.

It wasn't originally Granta's idea. In January 2003, when our twenty novelists were being assembled by the Sunday Times for the by now traditional group photograph, I remembered that I'd witnessed a similar scene in another London studio in the early 1980s. Not the first Best of Young British Novelists, which was still a year or two away, but a promotion called the Best of British Writers, organized by the Book Marketing Council and its chairman, Desmond Clarke. The idea then, quite radical in it's day, was to say, 'Look, Britain has all these jolly good writers, and for the getting of your pleasure and wisdom you should be buying more of their books.' All kinds of people, none particularly young and many now dead, climbed up a few flights of stairs to have their picture taken by Lord Snowdon.

As a reporter, I went to write about it for the Sunday Times. We had a struggle with John Betjeman in his wheelchair. 'Very kind of you, dear boy, very kind.' V. S. Pritchett was there, and Laurie Lee and Beryl Bainbridge. Disparate kinds of writers: poets, children's writers and essayists as well as novelists. It was odd to see them together; it looked like a piece of cultural nationalism that belonged to the Second World War—Writers Against Hitler. Odd, in fact, to see them at all; we were still in the time when writers were private figures, their public lives mainly confined to what was printed on the page. What they looked like, how they sounded, where they lived, what they believed: these things—always excepting the case of Betjeman—were mysterious to most people outside the narrow world of London publishing houses.

That quiet, and some would argue proper, state of affairs was transformed over the next decade. Literary festivals, bookshop readings, TV shows, marketing campaigns that stressed the writer's persona as much as his or her book—all of these made writers visible and fashionable. The first Granta list of Best of Young British Novelists—Amis, Rushdie, McEwan—was a prominent milepost down that road. How writers performed in public began to be important. Even how they looked. Today you'll hear it said, a popular grudge, that it's easier for a writer to find a publisher if he, and perhaps particularly she, is young and good-looking. Given the hype that now attaches itself to many young writers and their novels, the first question that arose in my mind when we were planning Best of Young British for a third time was: is it necessary? Times have changed since 1983, and even 1993. Slowly, dimly, I began to see that the hype that now often surrounds authorship made Best of Young British more necessary rather than less. What had been an exercise to publicize the literary novel, at a time when there were few spotlights on this particular branch of culture, might now have a new role as an independent consumer's guide to novelists who deserved to be read in an era where 'a thrilling debut by a young writer of enormous talent' is the standard blurb, and where there are now so many spotlights directed by marketing money and the size of the writer's advance.'