From Nobel laureates to debut novelists, international translations to investigative journalism, each themed issue of Granta turns the attention of the world's best writers on to one aspect of the way we live now. Granta's Best of Young issues, released decade by decade, introduce the most important voices of each generation - in Britain, America, Brazil and Spain - and have been defining the contours of the literary landscape since 1983.

Granta does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the power and urgency of the story and its supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real. As the Observer wrote of Granta: 'In its blend of memoirs and photojournalism, and in its championing of contemporary realist fiction, Granta has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world.'

Contributors have included Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Fatima Bhutto, Roberto Bolaño, A.S. Byatt, Anne Carson, Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, Robert Coover, Edwidge Danticat, Lydia Davis, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Mavis Gallant, A.M. Homes, Gabriel García Márquez, Martha Gellhorn, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, Stephen King, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Alice Oswald, Adrienne Rich, Salman Rushdie, Karen Russell, W.G. Sebald, Zadie Smith, George Steiner, Edmund White, Joy Williams and Jeanette Winterson.