Granta Books

About Granta Books

Granta Books is a London literary publisher started in 1989 by Bill Buford, then editor of Granta magazine; Sigrid Rausing, who bought Granta in 2005, is its publisher.

The magazine is far older. Cambridge University students launched The Granta in 1889, taking the name of the river through the town. In 1979 Buford and Pete de Bolla turned it into a literary quarterly of new writing. The book list followed a decade later, planned at first as a small programme of about six titles a year with Penguin handling distribution and promotion. Its opening titles included John Berger's Once in Europa, Gabriel García Márquez's Clandestine in Chile, Martha Gellhorn's The View from the Ground and Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, and Buford went on to publish Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

In the 1990s control passed to Rea Hederman, publisher of the New York Review of Books. In 1997 he hired Frances Coady as publisher; the imprint then got its own sales department, grew its output roughly fourfold and added writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Edward Said and Herta Müller. Under Rausing the list has included Rebecca Solnit, Eleanor Catton, Han Kang and Sayaka Murata. Granta joined the Faber-led Independent Alliance sales group in September 2007, and when Rausing's Portobello Books closed in January 2019 its authors moved to Granta Books. Since 2019 Granta magazine has been owned by the Granta Trust, a charity Rausing chairs.