Meet the Author: Linda Grant
Image © Charlie Hopkinson
Linda Grant is an award winning novelist. Linda won the Orange Prize for Fiction for When I Lived in Modern Times (2000). Still Here (2002) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and A Stranger City, published in 2019, won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2020. Linda's latest novel, The Story of the Forest, is a sweeping family saga that spans the first half of the 20th century from the edge of the Baltic Sea to Soho via Liverpool. You can find The Story of the Forest and Linda's other novels on our catalogue.
What role did storytelling play in your life as you were growing up?
A very large one. There were few family documents, no family bible, my father, born in Poland, had no birth certificate, and the general rule of thumb for them as immigrants was to embellish the truth, tell the authorities what they want to hear. Facts were regarded as inconvenient, how you told a story was what mattered, how to entertain and and convince.
The family stories I grew up with were often very different when told by different relatives, I never knew who to believe. I think that all immigrants understand that they are in the business of reinvention for a new country and from that arise the possibility of fictions.
How did publication of The Cast Iron Shore change your life and your profile as a writer?
I came to fiction as a writer late, I was in my forties and had been working as a journalist for some years. The first chapter of The Cast Iron Shore came about from a newspaper article I had submitted which was rejected on the grounds of being ‘too vivid.’ I think it had taken me a long time to find my voice because I felt too much of a divided self, completely familiar with being English, but never really feeling a part of it, so for a long time I suffered from imposter syndrome.
When The Cast Iron Shore was published and won the David Higham First Novel Prize and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, it was the most tremendous endorsement of my sense of myself as a novelist and a story-teller. It still, I think, remained a struggle then, perhaps less so now, to convince the world that I wasn’t just a hack who had barged in where she didn’t belong. But from then on writing books took over from journalism.
What does a typical writing day look like for you if such a thing exists?
I only write in the morning and only for three or four hours, with a great deal of looking out of the window. I have a very small study in my flat which is on the top of a hill in North London. There’s a much larger block of flats across the road divided into two buildings with a narrow gap between them through which I could see the the Mordor-like structure of the Shard far away in the City and I loved to feel that the isolation of writing (particularly under lockdown) was weakened by the sight of another livelier world. But then a ‘luxury development of desirable apartments’ went up and the Shard has for me gone away.
The Story of the Forest is your latest novel. Can you tell us a little about it?
It begins with a young girl going into the forest near her home in Riga just before the start of the First World War. She’s carrying a basket to pick mushrooms like a child in a fairy tale, and there she meets a roving gang of Bolshevik boys which frightens her brother Jossel. He doesn’t get on with his father and he decides to take her away from there, to the New World. But events conspire against them and they get stuck in Liverpool, on the wrong side of the Atlantic and never leave. It follows the survival of their family and their descendants down to the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the shadow story of those they left behind. It’s a story of immigrants becoming more assimilated as the years go by, and history becoming a fairy tale told and lied about and invented.
Mina's life spans the 20th century. Where did you start with your research and how did you keep on top of such a huge subject?
When I started writing it in February 2020, I thought I would go to Riga and look around, but a month later the pandemic started and travel was impossible, so I didn’t really do very much research. The section of the novel which is set in Liverpool comes from my own recollections and the stories, true or false, my parents told me about their own lives. Luckily, when I was going through my mother’s papers after her death in 1999, I found a typewritten manuscript which detailed the businesses on Brownlow Hill which was the Jewish neighbourhood like the East End in London. It was a fascinating account (not written by her, though).
Writers often say that they 'hear' their characters speaking through their writing. When did you feel you captured the voices of Mina and Jossel?
Jossel is my father’s voice speaking to me as if he had never died. Mina was a much feistier version of some of my mother’s friends. They were very easy to write.
Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project?
I don’t have a new project, still trying to think of one.
One book, piece of music or work of art that everyone should experience?
Bach’s Partitas. He seems to have been taking dictation from God.
What is the strangest or funniest thing that your readers have shared with you?
My mother had a brother whom I wrote about in my family memoir Remind Me Who I Am, Again. I received a letter from a woman who had read the book, and recognised him as the boyfriend of her late aunt. It was a really sad story. Before returning to his regiment in 1943, part of the Allied liberation of Italy, he had gone round to her house to ask her father’s permission to marry her but he had told him to wait. He was killed a few months later. I don’t think my mother knew that story.
Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?
After university I hitchhiked across America and at one point was driven into the California desert at knifepoint. He let me out eventually, and I was picked up on a deserted road by a Mormon couple who gave me a cheese sandwich. All’s well that ends well. I lived to tell the tale.