Linda Grant was born in Liverpool in 1951, the daughter of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. She read English at the University of York and completed an MA at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, where she lived from 1977 to 1984. In 1985 she returned to Britain and became a journalist. Between 1995 and 2000 she was a feature writer for the Guardian, and was for five years a columnist on the Jewish Chronicle. Her first novel, The Cast Iron Shore (1996), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. Her second, When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), set in Palestine immediately after the Second World War, won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. Her novel Still Here (2002), set in Liverpool, tells the story of a middle-aged English woman and her relationship with an American architect. Her non-fiction includes Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution (1993) and Remind Me Who I Am Again (1998), an account of her mother's dementia, which won the MIND Book of the Year/Allen Lane Award. Her most recent book is The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel (2006), winner of the 2006 Lettre Ulysses Award. Grant's writing has been described as illustrating ‘the manner in which ideas, ideals and idealism can inform our own sense of who we are … Grant excels at the creation of recognizable characters who refuse to be passive; who won't accept the drift of time and their own ultimate inconsequence. She is a realist, and a passionate believer in the very idea of belief’ (Garan Holcombe).

GS: What are your first memories of Liverpool? In which part of Liverpool did you live? Say something about your house, your street, your neighbours.

LG: My grandparents on both sides came to England at the turn of the twentieth century from Poland and Ukraine and like the rest of the Jewish community settled in an area called Brownlow Hill, in the city centre, near the Adelphi Hotel. Most people moved out to the suburbs after the war – to two areas, Childwall, where I lived until I was eight, and then Allerton.