[2] In 1985, Grant returned to England and became a journalist, working for The Guardian, and eventually wrote her own column for eighteen months.
She wrote a personal memoir of her mother's fight with vascular dementia called Remind Me Who I Am, Again, which was cited in a discussion about ageing on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed in December 2003.
In an interview by Emma Parker for the University of Leicester's July 2008 'Unsettling Women: Contemporary Women's Writing and Diaspora' conference, and later published in the journal Wasafiri,[5] Grant said: I always wanted to make my living as a writer, but you couldn’t get a job as an author, so I got a job as a reporter on a local paper just before my eighteenth birthday.
[7] In November 2016, The Guardian newspaper published a detailed account of Grant's writing process, in which she noted, "My rituals of writing are so calcified I could be an elderly colonel at his gentleman's club: ironed newspaper, tea piping hot, shoes the correct colour for in town.
It's an act of severe, intense solitude, partly now destroyed by the internet, and its deceptive promise of the ease of looking things up as you go along.
"[8] Grant's début novel, The Cast Iron Shore, won the David Higham Prize for Fiction in 1996; awarded to the best first novel of the year.
[17][18] The Clothes on Their Backs was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and won The South Bank Show award in the Literature category.