Early years Colin Grant was born in England to Jamaican immigrant parents. He grew up on a council estate in
Luton, had a brother Christopher (who died from epilepsy) and attended
St Columba's College, St Albans.
Career Grant joined the
BBC in 1991 and has worked as a TV script editor and radio producer of arts and science programmes on
Radio 4 and on the
World Service. In 2009, a two-part documentary about
Caribbean Voices (1943–1958) was produced by Grant. He has written and directed plays, including
The Clinic, based on the lives of the photojournalists
Tim Page and
Don McCullin. Among several radio drama-documentaries he has written and produced are
African Man of Letters: The Life of Ignatius Sancho,
A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca, and
Move Over Charlie Brown: The Rise of Boondocks. Grant's first book was the biography
Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa (2008), described in
The Jamaica Gleaner as "magisterial, meticulously researched", in
The Independent on Sunday as "drawing on gargantuan research", and in
The Guardian as "eminently readable". In 2011,
I & I: The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer was published, a group biography, about which
Lemn Sissay said: "Colin Grant has cleverly personified the birth of a nation, the birth of a religion and the birth of reggae through the lives of
Bob Marley,
Peter Tosh and
Bunny Wailer." This was followed in 2012 by
Bageye at the Wheel, a memoir about growing up Jamaican in Luton that was shortlisted for the
PEN/Ackerley Prize. In 2016, Grant published the memoir
A Smell of Burning, about which
Maggie Gee wrote in
The Observer: "Colin Grant's brilliant, tender book is really two books: a history of our incomplete understanding of the puzzling brain phenomenon that is epilepsy, and the story of his beloved brother Christopher." It was chosen by
The Sunday Times as a Book of the Year 2016. In his 2019 book,
Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, which was a
BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, "Grant collates fragments from several hundred interviews, first-hand and archival, with a cross-section of Caribbean immigrants to Britain from the 1940s and early 60s, and allows his subjects to speak for themselves in idiosyncratic statements that refuse to be co-opted into a generalized account of immigrant experience." He was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020. In 2023, his memoir ''I'm Black So You Don't Have To Be
was published, its title described by The Guardian'' as "a jab at the privileges of the children of the Windrush generation who, hell-bent on being accepted by British society, have left the labour of Blackness to their parents." Having left the BBC in 2018, Grant is now director of WritersMosaic, a division of the
Royal Literary Fund. ==Personal life==