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Lynne Truss is best known as a playwright, an author and a journalist, as well as a radio broadcaster. Any time she does appear on the radio, one of the first questions that someone is bound to ask is whether or not she is related to Liz Truss. The fact that the dramatist who is obsessed with the correct use of grammar and other aspects of the English language shares a surname with the former Prime Minister means that the question is always likely to be asked. There is no real physical resemblance and there is a wide age gap, although neither thing means that they couldn’t be related, of course. The question is: are they?
Who Are We Talking About?
It wouldn’t be unreasonable for you to not really know who we’re talking about, at least as far as Lynne Truss is concerned. If you like in the United Kingdom then you’re almost certainly going to have at least some idea who Lizz Truss is, given she served as the Prime Minister for a short period of time. Even so, it is always helpful to be sure what you’re reading about, so here is a quick look at the two of them:
Lynne Truss
Born on the 31st of May 1955 in Kingston upon Thames, Lynne Truss’ first novel, With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, was released in 1994. There is certainly an argument that the most well known book that she has written was the non-fiction work Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, which came out in 2003 and saw her popularity shoot through the roof. The book was inspired by a show on BBC Radio 4, presented by Truss, entitled Cutting a Dash, which was all about punctuation. She has also written numerous radio plays as well as both fiction and non-fiction novels.
I always get Lynne Truss and Liz Truss mixed up, but it’s quite easy to remember: Lynne is “eats, shoots and leaves” while Liz is “pork markets and cheese”
— Mark Phippen (@mark_phippen) March 21, 2018
Liz Truss
Mary Elizabeth Truss was born on the 26th of July 1975 in Oxford. Brought up by her maths professor father and her mother who was a teacher and a nurse, the politics that she experienced as a child was, in her own words, “to the left of Labour”. Truss herself became the President of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats in her first year at university, but later joined the Conservative and Unionist Party. She took up numerous roles in the party after being elected as an MP, winning the party leadership in the wake of Boris Johnson’s resignation in 2022. Her time in charge lasted just 50 days, being out-lasted by a lettuce and boasting the shortest time in office of any British Prime Minister.
Are They Related?
On her own website, Lynne Truss says, “As far as I know, I am not related to the infamous economy-destroying Prime Minister, often mentioned in the same breath as a notoriously bland salad ingredient”. That feels like a fairly comprehensive rebuttal of the notion that the two might be related in any way. There are some similarities, if you wanted to be extremely generous, insomuch as Liz served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Childcare and Education from 2012 to 2014 and Lynne has written children’s novels. Even if they had both written books with the same titles, though, they still wouldn’t be related.