13 Facts About Jenny Diski

Jenny Diski FRSL was an English novelist, non-fiction writer and memoirist.

Jenny Diski's memoirs include In Gratitude, The Sixties, Skating to Antarctica, and Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions, for which she won the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

Jenny Diski was a troubled teenager with a difficult family background.

Jenny Diski deserted the family when Diski was aged six.

Jenny Diski's father came back, but left permanently when she was aged eleven.

Jenny Diski was taken in and mentored by the novelist Doris Lessing; she lived in Lessing's house for four years.

Jenny Diski was educated at University College London, and worked as a teacher during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Jenny Diski spent much of her youth as a psychiatric inpatient or outpatient.

Jenny Diski concludes that, in the words of Charles Shaar Murray, "The line from hippie to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as people like to believe".

Jenny Diski rejects the usual "cancer cliches", instead going back to her time with Lessing, meeting other famous literary figures including Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe, Lindsay Anderson, and R D Laing.

Jenny Diski married Roger Marks in 1976, and they jointly chose the name Diski.

Jenny Diski's later partner until the end of her life, Ian Patterson, known as "the Poet" in Diski's writings, is a poet, translator and was director of studies in English at Queens' College, Cambridge.

In June 2014, Jenny Diski was told that she had at best another three years to live.