19 Facts About Marghanita Laski

Marghanita Laski was an English journalist, radio panellist and novelist.

Marghanita Laski wrote literary biography, plays and short stories, and contributed about 250,000 additions to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Marghanita Laski was born in Manchester, England, to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals.

Marghanita Laski was educated at Lady Barn House School in Manchester and St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, worked in fashion, then studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was a close friend of Inez Pearn, who was later to become a novelist and marry Stephen Spender and subsequently, after a divorce, Charles Madge.

Marghanita Laski began writing in earnest after her son and daughter were born.

Marghanita Laski wrote the original screenplay of the 1952 UK film It Started in Paradise and sold the film rights to Little Boy Lost, her novel about an Englishman in search of a lost son in the ruins of post-war France, to John Mills.

Marghanita Laski turned towards non-fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, producing works on Charlotte Mary Yonge, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling.

Marghanita Laski was a member of the Annan Committee on broadcasting between 1974 and 1977.

Marghanita Laski joined the Arts Council in 1979, was elected its Vice Chair in 1982, and served as the Chair of the Literature Panel from 1980 to 1984.

Marghanita Laski was an omnivorous reader, and from 1958 she was a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In just her first year alone, Marghanita Laski contributed 8,600 slips.

Marghanita Laski was known to be fond of crime fiction, and her OED influence in particular to her interest in the works of Charlotte Yonge translated onto the novelist's accession within the OED's first and second editions.

Marghanita Laski had a habit of noting down in a small notebook any words that she thought would be useful for the OED in her readings.

In 1968, when the first volume of the Supplement was completed, Marghanita Laski sent a purposefully timed letter to the Times Literary Supplement expressing her appreciation for the Supplement, to coincide with the date of its official publication.

Marghanita Laski was one of the few individuals to receive a copy of that first volume of the Supplement even before its publication.

Marghanita Laski went as far as to call in a written submission to the Waldock Report or Waldock Committee, devoted to the modernization of OUP.

Marghanita Laski conveyed her worries about how non-literary texts, which she considered a significant source of vocabulary that illuminated the history and development of the English language, were too often neglected.

An avowed atheist, Marghanita Laski was a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Marghanita Laski died at Royal Brompton Hospital, London, due to a smoking-related lung problem, on 6 February 1988, aged 72.