Viv Groskop

Viv Groskop is a British journalist, writer, and comedian. She has contributed to such publications as The Guardian, Evening Standard, The Observer, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and Red magazine. She writes about the arts, books, pop culture, and current affairs, often with a feminist slant. She is a stand-up comedian and improviser, and was a finalist in Funny Women 2012 and a semi-finalist in So You Think You Are Funny 2012. She is also the host of the Mint Velvet clothing podcast We Are Women. Groskop was born in Hampshire and grew up in Bruton, Somerset, with her younger sister Trudy. She received a scholarship to Bruton School for Girls and later studied Russian and French at Selwyn College, Cambridge, graduating with a first-class degree. She holds a master’s degree with distinction in Russian from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Since her teens, Groskop believed that her surname had Russian roots, until a Canadian cousin researched her family tree and discovered that the Yiddish translation of the surname Groskop means “thick head,” and that her Jewish great-great-grandfather Gershon Groskop came to the United Kingdom in the 1860s from Łódź in Poland. Gershon Groskop was also the great-grandfather of television presenter Gethin Jones. Groskop began her journalism career at Esquire as assistant editor at the age of 22. She then joined the Daily Express team and became a columnist for the Sunday Express at the age of 25. She was named one of the most successful freelance journalists in the United Kingdom and was twice nominated for the Periodical Publishers Association Columnist of the Year award. Groskop is a contributing editor of Russian Vogue. For the British press, she has interviewed Russian speakers in their native language, among them Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the murdered Alexander Litvinenko, and Beslan school hostage survivor Fatima Dzgoeva. She has also conducted interviews in French, including with the surviving daughter of the author of Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky. Her first book, I Laughed, I Cried, is an account of Groskop performing one hundred comedy gigs in one hundred nights. It is described as “an experiment in doing what you want, even if it’s awful, without giving up the day job.” It was published by Orion on 27