The End? Writers Respond to John Barth | Granta Magazine

The End?: Writers respond to John Barth

Various Contributors

'I suggest he put aside all his writing rituals and that he give away all his money – that way he might find his talent will be rebooted.'

John Banville

John Banville's novels include The Revolutions Trilogy - Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler which won the Guardian Fiction Prize (1981) and The Newton's Letter (1982) - The Book of Evidence (1989), The Untouchable (1997), The Sea (2005) which won the Booker Prize, and most recently The Inifinites (2009). He lives in Dublin and is Literary Editor of the Irish Times.

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A.L. Kennedy

A.L. Kennedy is the author of novels, short stories and nonfiction. Her most recent book is We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time, published in 2020. She was one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 1993 and 2003 and a judge of the same list in 2013.

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Colum McCann

Colum McCann won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction for Let the Great World Spin.

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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.

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John Barth

John Barth’s fiction has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a professor emeritus in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His novels include The Floating Opera (1956), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and The Tidewater Tales (1987). His collections of short stories include Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and On with the Story (1996). His most recent novel is Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011).

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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

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