Edinburgh university graduate features on Times Young Power list

Grace Murray, a recent graduate from the University of Edinburgh, has been featured on The Sunday Times’ Young Power list 2026.

Every year, the list highlights 30 people under the age of 30 from across the UK. Hannah Swerling, The Sunday Times Commissioning Editor, deems them to be “at the forefront of a new era of British excellence.”

The list features young people from a range of industries and backgrounds, such as the award-winning singer Raye, the England and Arsenal striker Alessia Russo, and Arvid Lindblad, the 18-year-old Formula One driver.

One of these trailblazing individuals is Grace Murray, who at just 22 years old has already published her first novel. Grace wrote Blank Canvas while she was still studying full-time at Edinburgh University.

Murray studied English literature at Edinburgh, and managed to pen her novel while working two part-time jobs.

“I’d write a few pages in the morning, go to a seminar, tutor GCSE English students, then do the bulk of my editing at night,” she told The Times.

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The plot from the novel arised from a flat party she went to in Edinburgh: “Someone asked my friend where she was from. We are both from Norfolk but she said ‘London’. It made me think, what drives us to lie or reinvent ourselves at university?”

The book is set at a college in New York, with the protagonist Charlotte claiming to a fellow student that her father had recently died of a heart attack, despite him in fact being alive and well in England.

It follows her relationship with this student, Katarina, and how a single lie begins to unravel it all.

It has already received a glowing review from The Guardian, who called it a “superb debut”.

Murray’s second novel is already in the works, tackling the wholly different subject matter of “the themes of male friendship and the harmful side of nostalgia.”

Featured image via Instagram.