British · b. 1951
Linda Grant writes novels about people wearing history's hand-me-downs. The British author won the Orange Prize for "When I Lived in Modern Times" (2000), set in Palestine as Israel is being born; a young English hairdresser arrives in Tel Aviv and finds herself inside a violent creation myth. "The Clothes on Their Backs" (2008) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Grant's family fled Hungary and Romania for Liverpool; her fiction returns repeatedly to Jewish displacement, assimilation, and the costumes people don to remake themselves.