A letter from the Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing, responding to some edits she disagreed with, is one highlight. She writes, “The problem here is that I do have a strong reluctance to writing it at all, which disarms me; but you, I think, dislike a style which is natural to me – between the two of us, we have produced a curious lifelessness.”
In a press release, Sigrid Rausing, editor of Granta, commented: "I am delighted that the Granta archive has found a permanent home at The British Library, where it will be preserved and finally made available to scholars and lovers of literature alike. The material generated from forty years of publishing Granta does so much more than simply showcase the history of our beloved literary quarterly: it also reveals how a plucky American, determined to shake things up by bringing new, edgy American writing to British readers, accidently ended up championing some of Britain’s – and indeed the world’s – most exciting writers. As a major research centre which attracts readers from all over the world, the Granta archive is now in the best of hands."
The British Library holds a major collection of contemporary literary archives, including the Hay Festival archive and the archive of Virago, the feminist publisher, as well as many individual authors’ archives.
