Her father worked in the Great Western Railway offices and was an amateur pianist; her mother was a teacher. She has one younger brother, Rod, also a writer. Her childhood experiences of World War II as well as her yearly visits to Wales inform much of her major fiction. She attended Somerville College at Oxford and was the first woman to edit the university newspaper. After earning her M.A. in 1956, she subsequently entered a seven-year period as a journalist in London for the
Sunday Times. In a 1976 author-information brochure published by Atheneum, Cooper admits that this work was deeply satisfying; she also compares it, in its effect on a young novelist, to Circe's island--"seductive, but death if you stay too long." Cooper came to the United States in 1963 when she married an American professor, Nicholas Grant; they lived in Massachusetts and had two children, Jonathan (born in 1966) and Katharine (born in 1967). One of her nonfiction works,
Behind the Golden Curtain: A View of the U.S.A. (1965), is a result of her new experiences as well as her journalistic career.
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