And The Next Big (American) Writer Is ...

The guys at Granta magazine bring their crystal balls out of the cupboard every ten years to predict the most important writers of the future. They've done it with British writers with a great degree of success: a glance at the lists for 1983, 1993, 2003 reads like a Who's Who of the British literary scene.

And now, for the second time they are doing the same with American writers, the Guardian reports.

They didn't do a bad job last time with Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore and David Guterson making the list. But most of the writers, I still haven't heard of, despite a more than average ear to the ground. (It's probably something to do with my Britlit bias: apologies to my American friends.)

These then are the chosen ones, and if you want to read more about them, there's a biodata of each on the Granta website.

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

How many have you heard of? If you said "All of them", sorry, you're bluffing. Seven have not been published yet and make their debut in the latest edition of the magazine.

A.L.Kennedy (herself Granta listed twice) on the Guardian blog admits she's only heard of one them.

I feel nicely smug because I've heard of Jonathan Safran Foer, have bought Uzodinma Iweala's novel, and have read (and loved!) Yiyun Li and Rattawat Lapcharoensap. (Come to think of it, it seems that some good writers from elsewhere have been conveniently appropriated. Poor Yiyun Li probably doesn't even have her green card yet!!)

The age limit for "young writers" has now apparently been lowered from 40 to 35. Says Granta editor Ian Jack:

People seem to be writing (and publishing) fiction sooner ... they have, at least in theory, a head start on their predecessors and should be getting better, quicker.

In the introduction to the current issue of the magazine which brings together samples of the writing, Ian Jack points to a changes in focus: writers' interest in social class has "ebbed" and in its place is "a concern with death, uncertainty and the outside world". He also observes that nearly all of the writers on the list have attended creative writing courses.

But won't be all sunshine and roses for listed writers from hereonin if Kennedy's own experience is anything to go by. She described the dubious pleasures of:

... touring the country for readings, largely to tiny audiences, and sitting in a cupboard with my fellow authors to sign so many copies of Granta that by the end of it all, my signature was so permanently mangled I had to notify my bank. And it meant I attended a party at the Saatchi gallery and got to see the Blood Head and Patrick Stewart.

But come to think of it, the first time I heard of A.L.Kennedy was on a Granta list, and I have, since, bought her books.

I think I will make my predictions about the most promising young Malaysian writers, but hey, I'm going to seal up the paper and bury it in a time-capsule ... and blog about it ten years hence!

Mulaika for David T.K. Wong

Just came across this little nugget of information. This year's David T.K. Wong scholarship has gone to a Malaysian writer - Mulaika Hijjas. The award, worth £25,000 is given to a writer who wants to write in English about the Far East to fund a residency at UEA. The recipients have included acclaimed Thai/American writer Rattawat Lapcharoensap. (You can read about the others here.)

According to the information on the website:

Mulaika Hijjas, our latest David T. K. Wong Fellow, has published short fiction in literary journals in the United States, Malaysia and Hong Kong. After leaving university she spent two years working full time on a collection of short stories, before doing a PhD on nineteenth-century Malay poetry by women at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but now lives on the Isle of Dogs in London. While at the University of East Anglia, she will be working on a novel set in contemporary Jakarta, about an expatriate English family and their Indonesian servants.

I read one of her stories The Durian Season which appeared in the Southeast Asian Review of Literature some time back - and it is very good.

Malaika is the first recipient of the award from Malaysia, although Tash Aw and another friend (I'm not sure if she wants her name mentioned, so I won't ... but she was one of Raman's lazy Silverfish writers) have financed their own way through the MA in Creative Writing at UEA.

Congrats Mulaika, and all the best with your novel.

Related Posts:

The Real David T.K. Wong (5/6/06)
A Toast to Mr. Wong (13/10/06)

Between Pussy and Elephant: Gritty Social Reality

Rattawat Lapcharoensap writes with both compassion and maturity and his Sightseeing is a wonderfully self-assured collection of short stories from a first time writer.

All but one of the stories are written from the point of view of teenagers coming to terms with a confusing adult world. And although the setting for each story is Thailand, Lapcharoensap steers well clear of the kind of exoticism that bedevils most South-East Asian literature. Indeed, the Thailand of the tourist brochure is roundly mocked in the opening story Farangs. Says a hotel proprietor, tourists only want "pussy and elephant":

"You give them history, temples, pagadas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead geting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between."

There's a gritty social realism in his choice of settings: a down-market brothel, a smouldering rubbish-dump, a refugee shanty, cockpits, with many of the characters living on the edge in economic terms. Lapcharoensap has his characters speak in a street-smart, vernacular language which eliminates the distance still further.

In a collection this strong, it's hard to pick favourites. But I won't easily forget the poignant tale of a son taking his mother on one last holiday before she looses her sight in the title story, and the agonising betrayal of a childhood friendship in Draft. And the last story in the book, Cockfighter - at 80 pages more a novella than a short story - is a real heart-stopper.

I've not felt this enthusiastic about a short story collection since Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies . And if I were still teaching literature at college level, I'd choose this as a set-text for sure.

(You can hear Rattawat Lapcharoensap talk about his book and read an excerpt in this recording from the Guardian blog. I also wrote a previous post about the author here.)

First Books

The Guardian First Book Award shortlist was announced today. Only one work of fiction made it to the list - the short fiction collection Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Poor old Tash is out of the running once more - but hey, did so well to be longlisted.

There's such a tasty list of non-fiction here that I am actually afraid to read the details least a serious attack of bookgreed sets in.

But I have no appetite to read at the moment while I'm churning out words ...