Acclaimed writer and journalist, Linda Grant, was this year’s Golding Speaker on Friday September 27. In conversation with journalist and broadcaster Alex Clark, Grant spoke about her latest novel, now out in paperback – The Story of the Forest. This, her ninth novel, was shortlisted for the Orwell prize for Political Fiction in 2023. Grant also spoke about her family background, her journey to becoming a writer and her approach to the creative process of writing. The Town Hall audience were also treated to a reading of a humorous extract from the novel.
Born into an immigrant family with grandparents from Russia and Poland, Grant explained, “The status of my family was unsure – an immigrant family outside the class system with not much documentation of family life. My parents and all the family were phenomenal story tellers. We had so few documents that facts didn’t matter.”
Grant herself was part of this tradition, regularly praised for her stories/compositions at school. However, she didn’t immediately write fiction and spent many years as a successful journalist.
There were several reasons why she didn’t immediately write fiction. She explained how the English Literature that she read and studied at school, such as Thomas Hardy, all seemed to be writing about nature. “I had no clue about nature.” She also, “didn’t grow up in a literature milieu so I didn’t know how to get published.”
Finally, she had what she described as a lightbulb moment. “I thought you had to wait for the muse to strike but then I realised you have to just sit down and get on with writing.”
Unlike many authors, Grant does not write a detailed plan before embarking on a novel. “If I know what’s going to happen I can’t be bothered to write it… I need to try to investigate characters and discover what is their purpose in the novel. What are they trying to hide from me? What I want to do is make the reader want to turn the page to find out what happens next.”
In all her novels she draws on her family background in largely urban settings. She commented that she is interested in, “Stories told and retold, secrets in families and truth manipulated.”
The main female character in many of her novels often has her hopes and dreams thwarted in some way. “Women have a moment of potential freedom but then the shutters come down.” This happens in The Clothes on Their Backs (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and in When I lived in Modern Times(which won the Orange Prize for Fiction).
The Story of the Forest tells the tale of the Mendels, a Jewish family whose members leave Riga in the early 20th century and settle in London and beyond. The novel starts with, says Grant, “a fairytale moment” of a young girl wandering into a forest to pick mushrooms. She meets a group of young Bolsheviks and is kissed by one of them. Her older brother tries to rescue her from being married off and leaves with her to start a new life in America. However, they end up settling in Liverpool.
The novel spans most of the 20th Century ending with Mina’s Great Granddaughter at the beginning of the 21st Century. The story of what happened in the forest recurs right through the book and resonates through the generations. Grant is interested in writing about unrecorded lives and marginal people. She has always been a feminist and states “women’s stories need to be told.”
Ultimately the novel is, says Grant, “About dreaming of a future combined with a kind of fatalism and influenced by the times and tides of history, family and money.”
Marlborough LitFest hosts an annual Golding Speaker to highlight the town’s long connection with the Nobel Laureate and Booker Prize winner, William Golding. The event is sponsored by William Golding Limited. Past Golding Speakers include Sebastian Barry, Ali Smith, Elif Shafak, Ben Okri, Rose Tremain, Will Self, Lionel Shriver, Louis de Bernieres, Fay Weldon and Howard Jacobson.
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