Sigrid Rausing
Publisher, Granta magazine and Granta Publications
I am the Publisher of Granta Publications and Granta magazine. I also chair the board of the Granta Trust, with board members Rana Dasgupta and George Prochnik.
A book I love from Granta’s backlist: I love all Janet Malcolm’s books, but particularly In the Freud Archives, a forensic analysis of the cultish aspects of the American psychoanalytic community.
My recommendations – it depends on what I am reading and who I am talking to. I thought the recently republished Black Like Me by John Griffin was fascinating, and I’ve been rereading Jessica Mitford – The Makings of a Muckraker is wonderful, with some of the pedagogic quality and generosity of some of Lydia Davis’ essays. I also love Victor Klemperer’s diary of the war years – he was a Professor of Romance languages, and set out to record linguistic changes in Nazi Germany, and the text also describes every day life in Dresden, and his own gradual loss of status.
A favourite short story: I like Hemingway’s African stories, and of those I particularly love ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’. He set out to imitate life in this collection, and life, it turned out, was more often than not about death.
