Miriam Gross


Miriam Gross is a literary editor and writer in Britain.
She was the deputy literary editor of The Observer from 1969 to 1981, the women's editor of The Observer from 1981 to 1984, the arts editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1986 to 1991, and the literary editor of The Sunday Telegraph from 1991 to 2005. She served as senior editor of Standpoint magazine from 2008 to 2010 and now serves on their advisory board. Writing in The Spectator, the historian Paul Johnson said that "the beautiful and elegant Miriam Gross is queen of the lit eds."
From 1986 to 1988 she edited Channel Four's Book Choice. She is also the editor of two collections of essays, The World of George Orwell and The World of Raymond Chandler.
While at The Observer, she conducted a series of interviews, with, among others, the poet Philip Larkin, playwright Harold Pinter, thriller writer John le Carré, painter Francis Bacon, Nobel Prize–winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, novelist Anthony Powell, philosopher and historian Sir Isaiah Berlin, philosopher A.J. Ayer, and Svetlana Stalin.
Gross has contributed to The Spectator, as the magazine's diarist, and has written an occasional column for the Financial Times. She has also served as a judge on the Booker prize and on the George Orwell memorial prize.
She is the author of a memoir, An Almost English Life.

Family and education

She was born in Jerusalem in pre-state Israel. Her Jewish parents, Kurt May and Vera May, fled Nazi Germany, but two of her grandparents as well as many other relatives in Germany who didn't escape were murdered in the Holocaust. She grew up in Jerusalem, Switzerland and England. She was educated at Dartington Hall School and at Oxford University where she read English literature at St Anne's College. She was married to the literary and theatrical critic John Gross. The couple had two children, Tom and Susanna Gross. Since 1993, she has been married to Sir Geoffrey Owen, the former editor of the Financial Times.