Bill Buford was for sixteen years the editor of Granta magazine, which he relaunched in 1979. Previously he was the fiction editor at The New Yorker, where he now works as a staff writer. He is the editor of The Granta Book of Travel, The Granta Book of Reportage and The Granta Book of the Family. He is also the author of Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.