Diana Athill | |
---|---|
Born | Kensington, London, England | 21 December 1917
Died | 23 January 2019 101) London, England | (aged
Occupation | Literary editor, author, publisher |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford |
Genre | Novels and memoirs |
Notable works | After a Funeral, Somewhere Towards the End |
Notable awards | OBE, PEN/Ackerley Prize, Costa Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award |
Relatives | Philip Athill (nephew) |
Diana Athill OBE (21 December 1917 – 23 January 2019) was a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the greatest writers of the 20th century at the London-based publishing company Andre Deutsch Ltd. [2]
Diana Athill was born in Kensington, London, during a World War I Zeppelin bombing raid, [3] daughter of Major Lawrence Francis Imbert Athill (1888–1957) and Alice Katharine (1895–1990), whose father was the biographer William Carr (1862–1925). Diana had a brother, Andrew, and a sister, Patience. [3] Her maternal grandmother was the daughter of James Franck Bright (1832–1920), a Master of University College, Oxford. [4] She was brought up at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, a country house owned by her mother's family. [5] [6]
Athill graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1939 [7] and worked for the BBC throughout the Second World War. [8]
After the war, Athill helped her friend André Deutsch establish the publishing house Allan Wingate, and five years later, in 1952, she was a founding director of the publishing company that was given his name. [9] She worked closely with many Deutsch authors, including Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Mordecai Richler, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Rhys, Gitta Sereny, Brian Moore, V. S. Naipaul, Molly Keane, Stevie Smith, Jack Kerouac, Charles Gidley Wheeler, Margaret Atwood, and David Gurr. [10] [11]
Athill retired from Deutsch in 1993 at the age of 75, after more than 50 years in publishing. [3] She continued to influence the literary world through her revealing memoirs about her editorial career.
The first book of her own writing to appear was the short story collection An Unavoidable Delay (1962), and she published two further works of fiction: a novel entitled Don't Look at Me Like That (1967) and in 2011 another volume of stories, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse. She was best known, however, for her books of memoirs, the first of which was Instead of a Letter in 1963. These memoirs were not written in chronological order, Yesterday Morning (2002) being the account of her childhood. She also translated various works from French.
She appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2004 at the age of 86 and selected a recording of Haydn's The Creation as the most valued of the eight records and Thackeray's Vanity Fair as the book. [12]
In 2008, she won the Costa Book Award for her memoir Somewhere Towards The End, a book about old age. [13] For the same book, she also received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009. [14]
Athill was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to literature. [15]
In June 2010, she was the subject of a BBC documentary, Growing Old Disgracefully, part of the Imagine series. [16] In 2013, she was listed as one of the 50 best-dressed over-50s by The Guardian . [17]
In 2011, Granta Books published Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend, a collection of letters from Athill to the American poet Edward Field chronicling their intimate correspondence spanning more than 30 years (he kept all her letters, she kept none of his). [18] [19] Granta Books published two further titles by her: Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter in 2015 and A Florence Diary in 2016.
According to journalist Mick Brown, "She attributes her flight from convention to her first love, Tony Irvine, an RAF pilot with whom she fell in love at the age of 15, and who was blessed, she says, 'with a very open approach to life.'" [20] The failure of her relationship with Irvine (referred to as Paul in Instead of a Letter), [11] her "great love", "blighted" many years: "My affairs after that, I kept them trivial if I possibly could. I was frightened of intensity, because I knew I was going to be hurt." [20] Irvine went to war in Egypt, and eventually stopped replying to Athill's letters, then two years later requested an end to their engagement. [3] At the age of 43, Athill suffered a miscarriage. [3]
She called herself a "sucker for oppressed foreigners", an inclination she characterized as a "funny kink" in her maternal instinct: "I never particularly wanted children, but it came out in liking lame ducks." [20] One lover, the Egyptian author Waguih Ghali, a depressive, committed suicide in her flat. Her most remarkable affair, about which she later wrote a book, was "a fleeting, and distinctly odd" relationship with Hakim Jamal, an American Black radical who asserted he was God and was a cousin of Malcolm X. Jamal's other lover, Gale Benson, was murdered by Trinidadian Black Power leader Michael X. Jamal was killed by others a year later. [20] Athill's account of these events was published in 1993 as Make Believe: A True Story.
Her longest relationship was with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord. The affair lasted eight years, but he shared her flat for forty. She described it as a "detached" sort of marriage. [20]
She moved into a flat in a north London residence for the "active elderly" at the end of 2009, [21] saying about this decision: "Almost at once on arrival at the home I knew that it was going to suit me. And sure enough, it does. A life free of worries in a snug little nest....". [22] Even during her old age, she reemphasized that she had no regrets about not having her own children, saying: "I dearly love certain young people of my acquaintance and am happy to have them in my life, but am I sorry that they are not my descendants? No...." [23]
Athill died at a hospice in London on 23 January 2019, aged 101, following a short illness. [24] [25] [26]
Her nephew and heir, the art historian Philip Athill, [27] is managing director of the dealership and gallery, Abbott and Holder. [28]
Jean Rhys, was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing.
Diana, Lady Mosley, known as Diana Guinness between 1929 and 1936, was a British aristocrat, writer, editor and fascist sympathiser. She was one of the Mitford sisters and the wife of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Simon James Holliday Gray was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to five published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.
Lynn Barber is a British journalist who has worked for many publications, including The Sunday Times.
André Deutsch was a Hungarian-born British publisher who founded an eponymous publishing company in 1951.
Michael X, born Michael de Freitas, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born self-styled black revolutionary, convicted murderer, and civil rights activist in 1960s London. He was also known as Michael Abdul Malik and Abdul Malik. Convicted of murder in 1972, Michael X was executed by hanging in 1975 in Port of Spain's Royal Gaol.
Ian Grant Jack FRSL was a British reporter, writer and editor. He edited the Independent on Sunday, the literary magazine Granta and wrote regularly for The Guardian.
Madeleine Clare J. Bunting is an English writer. She was formerly an associate editor and columnist at The Guardian newspaper. She has written five works of non-fiction and two novels. She is a regular broadcaster for the BBC. Her most recent series of essays for BBC Radio 3 was on the idea of Home, and broadcast in March 2020. Previous series of essays include 'Are You Paying Attention?' (2018) 'The Crisis of Care' (2016) and 'The Retreating Roar' (2014) on the loss of faith.
Tahmima Anam is a Bangladeshi-born British writer, novelist and columnist. Her first novel, A Golden Age (2007), was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. Her follow-up novel, The Good Muslim, was nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is the granddaughter of Abul Mansur Ahmed and daughter of Mahfuz Anam.
Sigrid Maria Elisabet Rausing is a Swedish philanthropist, anthropologist and publisher. She is the founder of the Sigrid Rausing Trust, one of the United Kingdom's largest philanthropic foundations, and owner of Granta magazine and Granta Books.
Julian Baggini is an English philosopher, journalist and the author of over 20 books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is co-founder of The Philosophers' Magazine, and has written for numerous international newspapers and magazines. In addition to writing on the subject of philosophy he has also written books on atheism, secularism and the nature of national identity. He is a patron of Humanists UK, an organization promoting secular humanism.
Eleanor Catton is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Born in Canada, Catton moved to New Zealand as a child and grew up in Christchurch. She completed a master's degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master's thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author ever to win the prize and only the second New Zealander. It was subsequently adapted into a television miniseries, with Catton as screenwriter. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.
Hakim Abdullah Jamal was an American activist and writer. He was an associate of Michael X and wrote From the Dead Level, a memoir of his life and memories of Malcolm X. During his life, Jamal was romantically involved with several high-profile women, notably Jean Seberg, Diana Athill, and Gale Benson.
Judith Hearne, was regarded by Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore as his first novel. The book was published in 1955 after Moore had left Ireland and was living in Canada. It was rejected by 10 American publishers, then was accepted by a British publisher. Diana Athill's memoir Stet (2000) has information about the publishing of Judith Hearne.
Barrington John Reckord, known as Barry Reckord, was a Jamaican playwright, one of the earliest Caribbean writers to make a contribution to theatre in Britain. His brother was the actor and director Lloyd Reckord, with whom he sometimes worked.
Jennifer Louise Worth RN RM was a British memoirist. She wrote a best-selling trilogy about her work as a nurse and midwife practising in the poverty-stricken East End of London in the 1950s: Call the Midwife (2002), Shadows of the Workhouse (2005) and Farewell to The East End (2009). A television series, Call the Midwife, based on her books, began broadcasting on BBC One in the UK on 15 January 2012 and on PBS in the US on 30 September 2012. After leaving nursing, she re-trained as a musician.
Noo Saro-Wiwa is a British-Nigerian author, noted for her travel writing. She is the daughter of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Thomas Gabriel Rosenthal was a British publisher and art critic.
Jean Rhys: Letters 1931–1966 is a posthumous compilation of author Jean Rhys's letters, first published in 1984 by André Deutsch and from 1985 by Penguin Books.
Worked for the BBC during the Second World War and afterwards as a publisher.
Her beloved nephew and heir, Phil Athill
This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines.(January 2019) |