Granta's list is a marketing exercise on behalf of contemporary literature, and was the brainchild of Desmond Clarke, who ran the Book Marketing Council in the early 1980s, before literary novelists acquired their present status as minor celebrities. The first list, published in 1983, included Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Graham Swift. It was, in other words, a particularly fortunate time to have embarked on such an exercise, and Bill Buford, then editor of Granta, who devoted an issue to the list, decided to repeat the process himself in 1993.