The Future of Magazines… and the World

Thomas Meaney is an editor and writer who lives in Berlin and London. In 2023, he became the editor of the literary magazine Granta, which has since taken a bold new direction. Memorable recent issues have been devoted to German and Chinese literature. (Its most recent issue is focuses on India.) The magazine has also revived its tradition of genre-defying nonfiction, in long-form articles by William T. Vollmann, Mary Gaitskill, Rahmane Idrissa, and the factory poet Xiao Hai, among others. As a writer, Meaney is best known for his essays, which appear in the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, as well as for his reportage in Harper’s. One of the more distinctive writers of his generation, he is known for his agile and commanding prose style and for the historical depth of his judgments.