Granta 91: Wish You Were Here

Description

Thoughts about Alan While Waiting for Harold by Simon Gray, the author of the celebrated and widely-acclaimed The Smoking Diaries returns to print with a tender, affecting, and of course funny account of his friendship with Alan Bates, written as he waits in Barbados for Harold Pinter to turn up. Plus: Said Sayrafiezadeh on his father's irritating dreams of human perfection, Ismail Kadare at the Great Wall of China (and Life), Simon Garfield on the addictive, beautiful and costly errors of the postage stamp, The Weather Where We Are - bulletins on our changing climate from Margaret Atwood, John Borneman, Urvashi Butalia, James Hamilton-Paterson, Thomas Keneally, James Lasdun, Javier Reverte and Rodrigo Rey-Rosa. New fiction from Karen E. Bender, Geoff Dyer, Gilad Evron and Frederic Tuten.

Ian Jack has edited Granta since 1995. He began his career in journalism on a weekly newspaper in Scotland in the 1960s. Between 1970 and1986 he worked for the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor, feature writer and foreign correspondent (mainly in the Indian Subcontinent). He was a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited that newspaper between 1991 and 1995. His awards in Britain include those for reporter, journalist and editor of the year. A book of his writing about Britain, Before the Oil Ran Out, was published by Secker and Warburg in 1987 and republished by Vintage in 1997. He lives with his family in London.