Linda Grant

Grant was born in Liverpool to a Polish-Jewish father and Russian-Jewish mother who had anglicized their surname; she studied at York and later spent years in Canada, earning graduate degrees at McMaster and Simon Fraser, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s to become a Guardian feature writer and columnist.

Her debut novel, The Cast Iron Shore, won the David Higham Prize; When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), set among Jewish emigrants building a new life in British Mandate Palestine, won the Orange Prize the same year it was published.

She later wrote Remind Me Who I Am, Again, a widely praised memoir about her mother's dementia, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.