Linda Grant
Born in Liverpool on 15 February 1951, Linda Grant picked up the Women's Prize for Fiction, one of several honours that would come to mark her career as a novelist and journalist working in British English.
Grant attended The Belvedere Academy before going on to study at the University of York. She later pursued further education at Simon Fraser University and McMaster University, a trajectory that took her across the Atlantic before her writing life took shape in the United Kingdom. She has worked as a novelist, a journalist, a columnist, and an opinion journalist, producing work in English throughout her career.
Alongside the Women's Prize for Fiction, Grant received the David Higham Prize for Fiction, an award given to debut or early fiction writers, which points to recognition of her novel-writing from a relatively early stage. She also holds an honorary doctorate, and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a distinction awarded to writers of demonstrated achievement. That fellowship places her among a body of authors and scholars recognised by one of Britain's older literary institutions.
Grant's work spans both fiction and journalism, and her output across those two forms has earned her a range of formal acknowledgements. The Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature remains one of the more concrete markers of her standing as a writer within the United Kingdom's literary culture.
Quotes by Linda Grant
But who can really remember pain? It’s impossible, you don’t remember it, you only fear it returning. These thoughts are like stitches – you see together a memory with them and the flesh heals over into a scar. The scar is the memory.
And your neihjbour is sitting next door weeping as she watches her child facing a crowd of Palestiniankids armed with rocks which could take your boy’s eye out or give him brain damage if god forbids he took off his helmet one of those dusty stones hit him in the head.
Pain itself, as a pure experience, is something different from the anxiety attached to it.
Without a physical presence on the shelves, the Kindle books seemed slightly insubstantial. There was no equivalent of the satisfying cracked spine. There was nothing to bequeath to the next generation, nothing to sell on to live a new life in someone else’s library. But at least the torrent of books that kept arriving had slowed down and there was space to walk up the stairs. I was being freed from the burden of all those bloody books.
A new dress. Is this all it takes to make a new beginning, this shred of dyed cloth, shaped into the form of a woman’s body?
What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father’s arms Where is the equivalence.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me – ‘Read me, please!’
I’m a really hectic dreamer; I never wake up not out of a dream, and there’s loads going on, lots of action, big blockbuster dreams, they’re all major enterprises.
