Diana Athill 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.
12 Facts About Diana Athill
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Diana Athill was born in Kensington, London, during a World War I Zeppelin bombing raid, daughter of Major Lawrence Francis Imbert Athill and Alice Katharine, whose father was the biographer William Carr.
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Diana Athill was brought up at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, a country house owned by her mother's family.
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Diana Athill 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.
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Diana Athill retired from Deutsch in 1993 at the age of 75, after more than 50 years in publishing.
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Diana Athill continued to influence the literary world through her revealing memoirs about her editorial career.
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Diana Athill was best known for her books of memoirs, the first of which was Instead of a Letter in 1963.
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Diana Athill 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.
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Diana Athill was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to literature.
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Diana Athill's 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.
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Diana Athill described it as a "detached" sort of marriage.
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Diana Athill died at a hospice in London on 23 January 2019, aged 101, following a short illness.