Books I Read This Year | Granta Magazine

Books I Read This Year

Various Contributors

A selection of Granta contributors discuss the books they read in 2012.

Ross Raisin

Ross Raisin was born in Yorkshire. He has written two novels, Waterline and God’s Own Country.

More about the author →

Taiye Selasi

Taiye Selasi was born in London. She holds a BA from Yale and an MPhil from Oxford. Her short fiction was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2012 and she was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013. Her debut novel, Ghana Must Go, was published in 2013.

More about the author →

Claire Vaye Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984 and raised in Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is currently a visiting professor at Princeton University. In 2012, Watkins was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's "Top 5 under 35" and was a finalist for the New York Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her debut short story collection, Battleborn, won the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize.

More about the author →

Peter Stothard

Peter Stothard is editor of The Times Literary Supplement. On the Spartacus Road is his most recent book.

More about the author →

Edmund White

Edmund White’s books include a trio of autobiographical novels, A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, as well as biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He first appeared in Granta as a translator of Milan Kundera from the French, and is now a contributing editor to the magazine. In 2018, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Career Achievement in American Fiction.

More about the author →

Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller is the author of nine novels including Ingenious Pain, winner of the 1999 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Pure, winner of the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. His most recent novel is The Slowworm's Song. He lives in south Somerset.

Photograph © Linda Nylind

More about the author →

Tan Twan Eng

Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang and lived in various places in Malaysia as a child. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian, Czech and Serbian. The Garden of Evening Mists is his second novel and is currently short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

More about the author →