By Mursi Saad El-Din I have just finished reading New Writing (volume 14), which is published by the British Council in association with Granta. This pioneering journal, launched almost 15 years ago, is devoted to works by up-and- coming writers. It does not confine itself to British authors, but is also open to any writer who "is a national of or resident in the UK or Commonwealth." In fact, the co-editors of New Writing are themselves an example of this inclusive editorial policy. Lavinia Greenlaw is an English poet with several collections to her name and a winner of a number of literary prizes. Helon Habila is a Nigerian novelist who won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. Out of 1,000 submissions, the editors of the volume selected 14 short stories, 15 poems and 18 extracts from novels. The contributors are from Britain, India, Sri Lanka, Canada and Australia. In their short but comprehensive introduction to the issue, the two editors start with a question that preoccupies all literary editors: "What exactly does one look for in good literature?". In answer, they say that "as soon as [they] began reading", what drew them was "writing that surprised, provoked and impressed us, pretty much in equal measure." In other words, there is no yardstick for good literature: you recognise it when you meet it. That a certain work meets all the qualifications that critics call for, demonstrating a knowledge of genre and technique, does not necessarily make it good literature. There must be something in it that, in the words of the co-editors, "lingers". Such works "gave the impression of having been made by remote control and remained remote in the reading." What the editors were looking for was a work that reflected "authenticity of sensation and the writer's ability to retain their fundamental impulse in the finished work." From the very start of its publication, New Writing has sought novelty in the texts it carries, and there is no doubt that the latest volume, like the previous ones, honours this aim. Most of the entries are by writers who have never been published before. A large portion of the 1,000 submissions was of "tourist fiction", as the editors put it, involving jaunts into the exotic and the underworld. A few texts explored the fantastic, "so it was thrilling to come across dark, mysterious worlds that, like the best kind of surrealism, operated as a trapdoor" into "the real". By and large, there was more bad poetry than good. There were many imitations of established poets, the editors comment, which proves the obvious: that good writing is easy to imitate but hard to create. There was a great deal of "lyrical prose", making for "a smooth ride along a perpetual present tense in which the language was so cushioned that one could barely feel the bump in the road." Finally, the co-editors declare that they still don't know what good writing is, "but we know we found it." There seems to be a certain New Writing -spirit that takes over, making it clear exactly what kind of piece fits such an anthology, something we could not expect to find in other anthologies, "but which dedicated readers of New Writing will recognise." I have been one such reader, following the publication from its beginning. It is what I would call a publication of discovery. Most of the names of writers in the 14 issues were new to me and, I am sure, to other readers. One writer who is apparently well- known but whose work I only came across in New Writing is novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah from Zanzibar. The fact that he has already published six novels in English raises the question whether he has published any works in his mother tongue, Swahili. I shall certainly start looking for an answer.
