Best contemporary Novelists

Lindsay Duguid, the fiction editor of the Times Literary Supplement, concedes that although lists are “intrinsically vulgar”, it is good for novelists to know that their names are appearing somewhere other than on a dust jacket. And Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review agrees. “The list is a good snapshot of what the New Yorker is looking for these days, ” he says, “and it includes some of my own favourite younger writers.”

But he raises an important point about the ability of any list to characterise what is happening in a country at any given moment. He argues that the idea that a group of 20 writers could hold the key to their generation is a bit of a stretch. These lists, especially of younger writers, mean less and less, as they either celebrate writers who are already familiar or else set out to discover new ones who have been overlooked by the reading public.

The underlying assumption of any list highlighting a younger generation is that writers produce their best work in their mid-thirties, once their writing has matured. But for every novelist such as Martin Amis or Graham Swift, who featured on the 1983 Granta list, and produced their breakthrough and arguably their best books around this time (Money and Waterland respectively), there is a Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall, the novel that crystallised her reputation and which she said she had been waiting all her life to write, was published only last year, when she was in her late fifites.

It is historically true that women have tended to come to novel-writing later in life, often after having children – take Jane Gardam, for example, or Penelope Lively. Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker has argued that this no longer holds for American novelists – but the trend has not entirely gone away in Britain. Francesca Kay’s An Equal Stillness, perhaps the most exciting first novel of the last couple of years, was published when the author was 51.

Looking back over the Granta lists, what is striking is how well they have tended to wear. With few exceptions, all of the novelists on the 2003 list have gone on to produce accomplished work – David Mitchell, for example, whose Cloud Atlas was a critical and commercial success, Andrew O’Hagan, Nicola Barker, Sarah Waters. This is true also of the 1993 selection, which championed writers such as AL Kennedy, Helen Simpson and Nicholas Shakespeare – though admittedly some of the others have faded into obscurity or gone off the boil.

The lists generated by the New Yorker and Granta are interesting as much for what they reveal about a country’s fiction as about the concerns of a writing generation. Though creative writing courses such as the pioneering one at the University of East Anglia have taken off in Britain, their presence is nothing like as pervasive as that of institutions such as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the States. “Writing is more developed as a craft in America, ” says John Freeman, “and American writers are constantly engaged with the question of being American. There is no similarly defining issue over here.” It is notable that most of the writers on the New Yorker list came though a creative writing programme – and many now teach on one.

Lorin Stein agrees with this view of American fiction as driven by the individual voice – “not as a marker of class or race, not as dialect, but as an expression of some shared, as yet unacknowledged, common tongue”. This is apparent in writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth – right up to contemporaries such as Jonathan Franzen or the late David Foster Wallace.

It is certainly true that the process of selecting writers for lists rarely produces entirely harmonious results. Alex Clark, one of the judges of the 2003 Granta list, has described that year’s selection as a mixture of established and unproven talent. The judges were criticised at the time for including writers who hadn’t yet been published – they read first novels by Monica Ali and Adam Thirlwell in manuscript form.

So with these potential problems in mind and in the hope of unleashing a debate similar in ferocity to the one triggered by the New Yorker, we are pleased to unveil our list of writers. We have used the same selection criteria as the New Yorker – all these writers are under 40 and all, with two exceptions, live in Britain – at least most of the time. But we haven’t controlled the types of writing, or worried about whether writers stand in some way for different experiences of Britishness. And we have frankly failed, if it matters, to achieve a gender balance – 13 out of the 20 are men – and most of these writers are white. But in other ways we have striven to be diverse, refusing to overlook excellent science fiction and genuinely good thrillers.

Our list is based unapologetically on talent and, to a lesser extent, potential – one of our selected writers, Anjali Joseph, will publish her first novel next month. Implicit in our selection is the expectation that these writers have their best work ahead of them. If some people complain that they haven’t heard of most of them, we will regard that criticism as a badge of honour.

Like the New Yorker, we have had, with sadness, to cast out some remarkable writers who are just on the wrong side of 39: David Mitchell, Tom McCarthy, whose novel , the follow-up to his brilliant first novel, Remainder, comes out later this year, and Catherine O’Flynn, whose sharp comedy, The News Where You Are, is published next month. And we haven’t found places for some writers we really love, but who haven’t had anything published for a few years – Rachel Seiffert among them.

We hope you will find our suggestions intriguing, and that you will investigate the novelists on our list and let us know what you think of their work. We have selected, in no particular order, Chris Cleave and Mohsin Hamid for their superior thrillers; the Irish comic novelist Paul Murray; Zadie Smith, long a favourite of these lists, for her fearlessly inventive novels, Benjamin Markovits and Adam Foulds, for their ambitious lives of 19th-century poets; David Szalay, for his inventive take on Soviet history; the incomparably talented science-fiction writer China Miéville; Adam Thirlwell, for his brainy Jewish fictions, Rana Dasgupta, for his idiosyncratic fictional history of Bulgaria; Scarlett Thomas’s zany novels of ideas, Joanna Kavenna, for her nuanced treatment of childbirth, Dan Rhodes and Patrick Neate’s comedies, Kamila Shamsie, for her multi-generational Asian sagas, Sarah Hall’s assured meditations on love – and Evie Wyld, Steven Hall, Ross Raisin and Anjali Joseph, for their captivating first novels.