Alex Grant Biography

Alex Grant is the author of Sex, Spies and Scandal: The John Vassall Affair (Biteback, 2024), an acclaimed biography of a 1960s spy which sheds new light on an important part of the history of British, politics, espionage, and the LGBT community. 

After reading English at Balliol College, Oxford, Alex worked as a journalist in the United States and Britain, and has written for the Guardian, Building Design and The Times about contemporary British politics, and development in London and elsewhere. He helped to research two books written by his brother, the barrister Thomas Grant: Court No. 1 The Old Bailey (John Murray, 2019) and The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid (John Murray, 2022). Thomas and Alex are currently collaborating on a new history of Britain, told through the prism of some of its most important trials. Alex is an experienced ghostwriter of autobiographies for dozens of private clients. In 2021 he was short-listed for the Biographers’ Club’s Tony Lothian Prize, for his proposal for a biography of John Stonehouse, the disgraced Labour MP who tried – and failed – to fake his own suicide in 1974.

Alex has extensive political experience. He worked in Parliament in 2008-12 as a senior researcher for Nick Raynsford MP, a former minister in the Blair government. From 1998 to 2014 he was a Labour councillor in the Royal Borough of Greenwich – defeating a young Liz Truss in 1998 and again in 2002, in a hyper-marginal ward.