Once every ten years Granta publishes a list of the twenty best American fiction writers under the age of forty.

In 1997 and 2007 Granta picked out such luminaries as Daniel Alarcon, Edwidge Danticat, Anthony Doerr, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Nell Freudenberger, Nicole Krauss, Lorrie Moore, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell, Akhil Sharma and Gary Shteyngart.

This issue presents a distillation of another generation's preoccupations. It is an anthology of twenty fascinating writers you will be hearing more from, chosen by panel of judges who are all acclaimed writers themselves: Paul Beatty, Patrick DeWitt, A.M. Homes, Kelly Link, Ben Marcus and Sigrid Rausing.

"Granta 135" is a snapshot of contemporary Ireland, which shows where one of the world's most distinguished and independent literary traditions is today. Here international stars rub shoulders with a new generation of talent from a country which keeps producing exceptional writers. This issue features Kevin Barry on Cork, "as intimate and homicidal as a little Marseille"; Lucy Caldwell imagining forbidden first love in Belfast; an exclusive extract of Colm Toibin's next novel, about growing up in the shadow of a famous father; fiction from Emma Donaghue about Victorian Ireland's miraculous fasting girls; and Sara Baume describing the wild allure and threat of the rural landscape. Also featuring fiction from Colin Barrett, John Connell, Mary O'Donoghue, Roddy Doyle, Siobhan Mannion, Belinda McKeon, Sally Rooney, Donal Ryan, and William Wall; poetry from Tara Bergin, Leontia Flynn and Stephen Sexton; photography by Doug DuBois, Stephen Dock and Birte Kaufmann; with original portraits of the authors in their environment by acclaimed street photographer Eamonn Doyle."

Granta 129 brings you twenty-two meditations on fate in all its many forms. From Joseph Roth's reflection on Sarajevo in the wake of the First World War to Cynthia Ozick's exploration of the limits of belief, this issue stretches our understanding of fate, both in fact and in fiction. Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard's fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer's last days. Mark Gevisser investigates transgender identities in America. Louise Erdrich presents a world where bodies can be traded in for a digital afterlife. In an extract from her forthcoming novel, Miranda July describes the awkward dynamics between an uptight office worker, her love interest and a disruptive twenty-year-old. Fatima Bhutto depicts the mounting of tensions between Christian and Muslim families in a remote valley in Pakistan and Granta's Best of Young British Novelist Helen Oyeyemi charts a course through an age of papyrus letters and mysterious maps in Barcelona's enigmatic Casa Mila. Fate features debut fiction by Sam Coll and S.J. Naude, as well as new writing by Kent Haruf, Sasa Stanisic, Andrea Stuart, Anjan Sundaram, Isabella Tree and Tim Winton and poetry by Mark Doty, Adam Fitzgerald, Barbara Ras and Mary Ruefle. It includes photography of Nazi monoliths along the coastline of northwest Europe by Ianthe Ruthven and a collection of Mexican miracle paintings with an introduction by Francisco Goldman.

Featuring fiction by Carmen Maria Machado and non-fiction by Oliver Bullough, Granta 150 is a celebration of the power of language.

'There must be ways to organise the world with language.'
From 'Binyavanga' by Pwaangulongii Dauod

The English language is like London, a cluster of myriad villages, each with its own atmosphere and particular cadences. This issue - our 150th - celebrates language, showcasing some of the most inventive writers of fiction today.

Sidik Fofana 'The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol's Front Porch'
Amy Leach 'How to Count Like a Pro'
Mazen Maarouf 'The Story of Anya'
Carmen Maria Machado 'The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror'
Tommi Parrish 'An Instrument of Pure Motion'
Che Yeun 'Yena'

Photographer Michael Collins chronicles his mother's life following a series of strokes, Oliver Bullough investigates the invention of shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, Andrew O'Hagan visits Carolyn, Neal Cassady's widow.

Plus: Pwaangulongii Dauod's eulogy for the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina.

Poetry: Jack Underwood and Jay G. Ying

Photography: Noriko Hayashi, and Ian Willms introduced by Adam Foulds

I found in my absence that I had missed two visitors: one left me nothing I could know them by; the other must have been a woman, judging by the gift of wood-shavings and pale grasses she had picked and twisted into a bouquet that lingered on my table.' - Andrew Motion, 'A Meeting of Minds with Henry David Thoreau' And Martin Amis, Thomas McGuane, Melinda Moustakis, Adam Nicolson, Mona Simpson Claire Vaye Watkins, Callan Wink and others.

This issue of Granta is about the difference between the world as we see it and the world as it actually is, beyond our faulty memories and tired understanding. It's also about the borderlands of politics and reason, and of reality and transcendence, in contested territories. Ludmila Ulitskaya's diary of cancer treatment in Russia and Israel Raja Shehadeh on emptying his mother's house in Ramallah Janine di Giovanni remembers Iraq before and after the American invasion Charles Glass on the jihadist occupation of an Armenian village in Syria Fiction by Jesse Ball, Kevin Canty, Jon Fosse, Sebastia Jovani, China Mieville, Ottessa Moshfegh and Tracy O'Neill Poetry by John Ashbery, Peter Gizzi, Kathryn Maris and Sandra Simonds Photography by Noemie Goudal and Ian Teh Plus: The second act of Anne Carson's TV show, 'Krapp Hour'

Granta 154: I've Been Away for a While deals with absence and presence, immediacy and distance in a time when these concepts are increasingly troubled.

Our 2021 winter issue features Rory Gleeson on an Italian doctor who was at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak; Lindsey Hilsum, author of the award-winning In Extremis, on cholera in Hutu refugee camps; and photography by Gus Palmer of an Islamic morgue in London, with an introduction by Poppy Sebag-Montefiore. Even more memoir comes from Ian Jack on the toxic slag heaps of Glasgow and the aristocratic lives built on them and Vidyan Ravinthiran on the civil war in Sri Lanka. A photoessay by Fergus Thomas of bareback horse racing in the Colville Reservation is accompanied by an interview with its subject, Duane Hall.

Plus, an excerpt from Eva Baltasar's Permafrost, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches; a new story by Paul Dalla Rosa, previously shortlisted for the 2019 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award; an extract from the new novel by Gwendoline Riley, author of First Love; fiction by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti; and fiction set in Philadelphia from Dan Shurley.

Plus, poetry by Jason Allen-Paisant, Jesse Darling and Nate Duke.

Animals. We love and care for them as pets, we weave them into our myths and fables and then we breed them under conditions of terrible cruelty just so we can eat them cheaply. As new developments in research into animal cognition force us to concede fewer characteristics separating us from our neighbouring species, this issue of Granta asks writers, poets and photographers to consider the complex ways we interact with the animal kingdom.

Han Kang meditates on canaries; Arnon Grunberg investigates the bloody business of slaughterhouses; Rebecca Giggs on leeches and the weather; Anjan Sundaram celebrates the life of a Rwandan 'hero chicken'; John Connell moves back home to his parents' farm.

With new fiction from Ben Lasman, Yoko Tawada and Nell Zink and new poetry from Ko Ko Thett.

We call ourselves the Fellowship, or sometimes the Church of God, but the world knew us as the Plymouth Brethren - Ken Follett These Mennonite colonies are self-policed, except in cases of murder. The bishop and the elders came up with a solution to the problem of how to punish the offenders: they would lock all nine men into sheds and basements for three or four decades - Miriam Toews Ivan Chistyakov: diary of a Gulag prison guard Sarah Gerard: going 'Diamond' with Amway Matilda Gustavsson: a false religious miracle Lauren Hough: growing up in the Family Aatish Taseer: with the Brahmins of Benares New fiction by Luke Kennard, Lara Vapnyar and Adam Thorpe Poetry: Will Alexander, Fen Sun Chen, Kelly Schirmann and Javier Zamora Plus, Emmanuel Carrere on photographer Darcy Padilla, and the relationship with her subject, Julie Baird Photography by Tomas van Houtryve and Francoise Huguier, introduced by Eliza Griswold and A.M. Homes

Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Julian Barnes, Roberto Bolaño, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nadine Gordimer, Nick Hornby, Kazuo Ishiguro, Han Kang, Stephen King, A.L. Kennedy, Doris Lessing, Ben Marcus, Lorrie Moore, Herta Müller, Alice Munro, Gwendoline Riley, Will Self, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, John Updike, Jeanette Winterson - the voices that define a generation have all appeared in Granta. See what's next.

From 1993 to 1994, Sigrid Rausing completed her anthropological fieldwork on the penninsula of Noarootsi, a former Soviet border protection zone in Estonia. Abandoned watchtowers dotted the coastline, and the huge fields of the Lenin collective farm were laying fallow, waiting for claims from former owners who had fled war and Soviet and Nazi occupation. Rausing's research focused on the loss of historical memory during the Soviet occupation, and the slow revival of an independent Estonian culture, including the recognition of the minority Swedes in Estonia. She lived and worked amongst the villagers, witnessing their transition from repression to independence, and from Soviet neglect to post-Soviet austerity.

New fiction from: Haruki Murakami, Ben Lerner, Amor Towles, David Means, Julia Armfield, Te-Ping Chen, Magogodi oaMphela Makhene, Sara Majka, Thomas Pierce, Adam O'Fallon Price, Jem Calder

Plus poetry from Nuar Alsadir, and a photoessay on transhumanism by Matthieu Gafsou with an introduction by Daisy Hildyard

This issue of Granta explores the conscious self in an age when we are finally taking mental health seriously.

We know how the brain works, but do we understand the mind? In an age when we are finally taking mental health as seriously as physical health, this issue of Granta explores the conscious self: how it perceives, judges and lives in the world.

With new fiction, reportage, poetry, photography, and art addressing this topical issue.

What happens after you fall in love? The essays and fiction in this issue of Granta look at the risk and reward of loving someone. 'Whatever Happened to Interracial Love' by the late African-American filmmaker Kathleen Collins, captures the atmosphere of the Civil Rights movement in New York and the dangerous risks taken by its activists. In an iconic essay 'Africa's Future Has No Place for Stupid Black Men' young Nigerian writer Pwaangulongii Daoud delivers a passionate elegy for his friend C-Boy, a gay activist in homophobic Nigeria. And Claire Hajaj describes a perilous journey from Raqqa to Allepo to Beirut, for a refugee from Islamic State. Suzanne Brogger describes the pain of being stalked; Emma Cline depicts a taut sibling relationship; Steven Dunn on a violent childhood; and Gwendoline Riley on first love. Also in this issue: FICTION Patrick Flanery, Victor Lodato; POETRY Vahni Capildeo, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Sylvia Legris and Hoa Nguyen; PHOTOGRAPHY Jacob Aue Sobol with an introduction by Joanna Kavenna

From Nobel laureates to debut novelists, international translations to investigative journalism, each themed issue of "GrantaGranta"'s "Best of Young" issues, released decade by decade, introduce the most important voices of each generation - in Britain, America, Brazil and Spain - and have been defining the contours of the literary landscape since 1983. "Granta" does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the power and urgency of the story and its supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real. As the "Observer" wrote of "Granta" "In its blend of memoirs and photojournalism, and in its championing of contemporary realist fiction, Granta has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world." Contributors have included Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Fatima Bhutto, Roberto Bolano, A.S. Byatt, Anne Carson, Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, Robert Coover, Edwidge Danticat, Lydia Davis, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Mavis Gallant, A.M. Homes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Martha Gellhorn, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, Stephen King, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Alice Oswald, Adrienne Rich, Salman Rushdie, Karen Russell, W.G. Sebald, Zadie Smith, George Steiner, Edmund White, Joy Williams and Jeanette Winterson."

The world, as we know it, is changing ...In the autumn issue of Granta, acclaimed nature writer Barry Lopez meditates on language and seeing; poet Kathleen Jamie travels to the Alaskan wilderness; science writer Fred Pearce describes the effort to keep Sellafield safe; Adam Nicolson investigates murder in rural Romania; Robert MacFarlane introduces unpublished extracts from the notebooks of Roger Deakin; and new Australian writer Rebecca Giggs witnesses the monumental death of a stranded whale. Fiction by Ben Marcus, Ann Beattie, Deb Olin Unferth and David Szalay. Poetry by Noelle Kocot, Maureen McLane, Ange Mlinko and Andrew Motion. Photography by Helge Skodvin introduced by Audrey Niffenegger. 'Every way one turned the tundra was laid out like a green sea, sedgy and subtle and glinting with secret melt pools and waterways.' Kathleen Jamie