Linda Grant (born 15 February 1951) is an English novelist and journalist. Early life 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-Jewish – 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. Career 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, which was cited in a discussion about ageing on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed in December 2003. Her fiction draws heavily on her Jewish background, family history, and the history of Liverpool. In an interview by Emma Parker for the University of Leicester's July 2008 'Unsettling Women: Contemporary Women's Writing and Diaspora' conference, and later published in the journal Wasafiri, Grant said: I always wanted to make my living as a writer, but you couldn’t get a job as an author, so I got a job as a reporter on a local paper just before my eighteenth birthday. I always knew that sooner or later I would write fiction, although I didn’t realise it would be as late as it was. I didn’t write a novel until after the age of forty because it took me a long time to find a fictional voice, which was to do with being Jewish. […] I had been trying different voices and found none adequate. I felt that there were two modes open to me. One was to have a voice like Howard Jacobson, which is absolutely embedded within a recognisable Jewish community, but I was from a community which was not recognised as Jewish. People say, ‘Oh, I never knew that there were any Jews in Liverpool’. Also, growing up in a middle-class family made me marginal to the Liverpool voice, which had always been working-class or Irish. And then there