Granta has long been known for the quality of its travel writing. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected. By the mid 1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writers that appeared in the magazine made journeys for more complex and often personal reasons. Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell Steavenson moved to Iraq as foreign correspondent. What all these pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.

Granta magazine has published some of the best writing about family relationships in the English language. Over the years its writers have dealt with the most difficult, the most important and the most personal relationships of their lives. Granta Books' publication, in 1993, of Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father? heralded the huge rise in popularity of the literary memoir, and since then Granta has carried pieces of non-fiction and fiction about the family from writers including Doris Lessing, Jane Anne Phillips, Hanif Kureishi, Jackie Kay, Helen Simpson, Linda Grant, Orhan Pamuk, Graham Swift, Ian Jack, Justine Picardie, Edmund White, Joy Williams, John McGahern, Jon McGregor, Paul Theroux, A. L. Kennedy, Siri Hustvedt and David Goldblatt. The New Granta Book of the Family collects together a stunning variety of pieces about every member of the family.

Issue 104 features original work by many of the writers who have helped to make Granta the most widely read literary magazine in the world. Granta has always succeeded when at its boldest and most unpredictable, when it has sought to challenge and confront as well as entertain and inform. In this spirit, the design has been refined and a new front section is being introduced, which includes a letters page that will serve as a forum for readers' views and opinions. The result is a magazine that carries a timely sense of renewal and possibility as Granta sails on into its second century.