1. Jack Monroe was born on 17 March 1988 and is a British food writer, journalist and activist known for campaigning on poverty issues, particularly hunger relief.
40 Facts About Jack Monroe
1. 2.
Jack Monroe initially rose to prominence when a post on her blog A Girl Called Jack went viral.
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Jack Monroe has published seven cookbooks that focus on "austerity recipes" and meals which can be made on a tight budget.
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Jack Monroe has written for publications such as The Echo, The Huffington Post and The Guardian.
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Jack Monroe's father is of Greek-Cypriot heritage; he served in the British Army for seven years, then with the fire service for 30 years.
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Jack Monroe was awarded an MBE in 2007 Birthday Honours for services to children and families.
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Jack Monroe was diagnosed with autism and ADHD as a child, though was not made aware of this until she was an adult.
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Jack Monroe has described herself variously as working class and as middle class.
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Jack Monroe left school at age 16, "bullied and disillusioned", with insufficient GCSEs to progress to A Level.
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Jack Monroe worked in various jobs, including in a chip shop and then Starbucks.
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Monroe came to prominence in July 2012 when the "Hunger Hurts" post on her blog A Girl Called Jack went viral on social media.
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In November 2012, Jack Monroe became a weekly columnist for The Echo, a south Essex daily newspaper.
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Jack Monroe was later retained as an unpaid columnist for The Huffington Post.
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In July 2013 Jack Monroe started writing a twice-monthly food and recipe column for The Guardian.
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In 2013, Jack Monroe appeared in a six-week advertising campaign for Sainsbury's supermarket.
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Jack Monroe appeared on BBC television's late night political programme This Week in June 2015 and again in May 2019.
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In 2015 Jack Monroe was an ambassador for Child Poverty Action Group.
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Jack Monroe raised funds for the Live Below the Line campaign.
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In March 2022, Jack Monroe complained that due to inflation poor people could not afford food, fuel and rent, and were having to go without food or fuel, or were eating unhealthily because they could not afford healthy food.
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Jack Monroe called for social security benefits to be raised in line with inflation.
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In May 2022, Jack Monroe criticised Conservative MP Lee Anderson's praise in the House of Commons for a food bank which has a compulsory cooking and budgeting class for those accepting food parcels.
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Jack Monroe appeared in a Labour Party campaign video in October 2013.
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Jack Monroe left the Labour Party in March 2015, after disagreeing with its rhetoric on immigration, and became a member of the Green Party of England and Wales, in March 2015.
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In May 2017, Jack Monroe participated in a "blind election date" with British television personality Georgia Toffolo in which they discussed politics.
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In November 2014, Jack Monroe said on Twitter that then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron "uses stories about his dead son as misty-eyed rhetoric to legitimise selling our NHS to his friends".
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The Daily Mail journalist Sarah Vine criticised Jack Monroe for using the death of Cameron's severely disabled son for political purposes and "choosing" a life of poverty.
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Jenn Selby, writing in The Independent, described this as a "caustic attack", and Jack Monroe replied on Twitter that Vine's column was "homophobic, transphobic, deadnaming [and] ignorant".
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In May 2022, Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield, stated that Jack Monroe was "taking money off some of the most vulnerable people in society and making an absolute fortune [off] the back of people".
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In 2015, Jack Monroe won the Women of the Future Award in the media category.
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Jack Monroe was "surprised", saying "I'm not sure I'll even be a woman in the future".
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The award was won after Jack Monroe came out as non-binary, which created some controversy.
32.
Jack Monroe added the surname 'Monroe' as a tribute to Marilyn Monroe.
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Jack Monroe has requested that her birth name not be used by the media.
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The 2013 book deal resulted in housing benefit being frozen and Jack Monroe came close to being evicted, which led to moving into cheaper accommodation.
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In 2017, Jack Monroe said she had developed acute arthritis, citing the condition as a partial cause for her suspending her campaign for candidacy in the National Health Action Party.
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Jack Monroe's arthritis led her to develop a dependency on the prescription drug tramadol.
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In January 2019, Jack Monroe wrote a piece in The Guardian that stated she was recovering from alcoholism and discussed how drinking had affected her work and personal life.
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Jack Monroe had a brief relationship with a male friend which resulted in a son.
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Jack Monroe had a long-term relationship with a woman which ended shortly after Monroe told her partner she was considering a mastectomy.
40.
In January 2019, Jack Monroe announced her engagement to Head of Channel 4 News Louisa Compton but the relationship ended in 2021.