Linda Grant

Linda Grant FRSL (born 15 February 1951) is an English novelist and journalist.

Linda Grant was born in Liverpool. She was the oldest child of Benny Ginsberg, a businessman who made and sold hairdressing products, and Rose Haft; both parents had immigrant backgrounds – Benny's family was Polish-Jewish, Rose's Russian - and they adopted the surname Grant in the early 1950s.

She was educated at The Belvedere School, read English at the University of York (1972 to 1975), then completed an M.A. in English at McMaster University in Canada. She did post-graduate studies at Simon Fraser University.

In 1985, Grant returned to England and became a journalist, working for The Guardian, and eventually wrote her own column for eighteen months. She published her first book, a non-fiction work, Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution, in 1993. She wrote a personal memoir of her mother's fight with vascular dementia called Remind Me Who I Am, Again.

Her fiction draws heavily on her Jewish background, family history, and the history of Liverpool. She has developed a special interest in the state of Israel.

Grant's début novel, The Cast Iron Shore, won the David Higham Prize for Fiction in 1996; awarded to the best first novel of the year. Three years later her second, non-fiction, work, Remind Me Who I Am Again, won both the Mind and Age Concern Book of the Year awards.

Her second fictional novel, When I Lived in Modern Times won the 2000 Orange Prize for Fiction and was short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize the same year. In 2002 her third novel Still Here was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

In 2006, Grant won the First Prize Lettre Ulysses Award for the "Art of Reportage", the last to be awarded, for her non-fiction work about the Israeli people entitled The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel. The Clothes on Their Backs was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and won The South Bank Show award in the Literature category. It was also long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year.

In 2014, Grant was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).