Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

Granta 20: Adam Thirlwell

As part of an ongoing obsession, it is my crazed determination to offer detailed profiles on the Best of Young British Novelists (aka the Granta 20). Since David Mitchell needs no further mention by me (and indeed may suffer backlash now that he has been shortlisted for the Booker) and since dwelling upon the novelists has as much to do with how available Brit lit is on these shores, I thought I'd start with Adam Thirlwell.

At 26, Thirlwell is the youngest of the bunch (younger indeed than Zadie Smith) and perhaps the most obscure. He is assistant editor for Arete Magazine. He made it onto the Granta list on the basis of a few thousand words. (An excerpt from "The Cyrillic Alphabet" is available through the Granta site.

I'm in the middle of reading Politics right now.