Sigrid Rausing
Editor, Granta magazine, and Publisher, Granta Publications
I am the Publisher of Granta Publications, and the Publisher and Editor of Granta magazine. I chair our internal management board. On the book side, I keep an eye our acquisitions, making decisions with the team about offers above a certain level. I initiate partnerships, such as our relationship with the Wiener Library, and sign off on strategic developments, like our new poetry list. I also commission or acquire occasional books. On the magazine side, I lead the editorial meetings where we choose themes and titles, and discuss writers and photographers. I commission, acquire and edit pieces; sign off on photo-essays, images and design, and appoint occasional guest editors. I also chair the board of the Granta Trust, with board members Lisa Appignanesi and Jeremy Hardie. 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.
