JULIAN GRANT is a composer, writer, educator, music journalist, and broadcaster.  He has composed 20 operas of various lengths and sizes which have been performed by English National Opera, The Royal Opera, Almeida Opera, Mecklenburgh Opera, and Tétè-a-Tétè, and has won the National Opera Association of America’s  New Opera prize and been nominated for an Olivier Award.

In 2012, his Cultural Olympiad commission Hot House, devised by Gareth Malone, was premiered at the Royal Opera House. His chamber opera, with librettist Mark Campbell The Nefarious, Immoral but Highly Profitable Enterprise of Mr. Burke & Mr. Hare, a co-commission with Music Theatre Group and Boston Lyric Opera, premiered in Boston November 2017, and was nominated for an International Opera Award in 2018. During the pandemic he wrote a Suite for Solo Viola; a chamber opera commissioned by the Harvard Musical Association for the 50th anniversary of Emmanuel Music - Salt; and Scarlatti in Soweto, a further commission from Buskaid after the widely performed Sancho’s Dance Mix (2014). Jump Cuts was premiered by the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in 2022, and he recently completed Vaudeville in Teal for harpsichord and small orchestra for Mahan Esfahani. 

From 2002-07, he was director of music at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, London, a post previously occupied by Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In Hong Kong, he hosted a classical music radio show. He has lived in Tokyo and Beijing, where he worked with the Beijing New Music Ensemble and attempted to master the Yang Qin (Butterfly Harp). 

He currently lives in Princeton and New York and has an ongoing relationship with the Princeton Symphony Orchestra.