Diana Athill

Diana Athill (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 André Deutsch Ltd.

Early life Diana Athill was born in Kensington, London, during a World War I Zeppelin bombing raid, 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. She was brought up at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, a country house owned by her mother's family.

Athill graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1939 and worked for the BBC throughout the Second World War.

Career 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. 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.

In June 2010, she was the subject of a BBC documentary, Growing Old Disgracefully, part of the Imagine series. In 2013, she was listed as one of the 50 best-dressed over-50s by The Guardian.

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). Granta Books published two further titles by her: Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter in 2015 and A Florence Diary in 2016.

Honours and awards In 2008, she won the Costa Book Award for her memoir Somewhere Towards The End, a book about old age. For the same book, she also received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009.

Athill was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Personal life 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.'" The failure of her relationship with Irvine (referred to as Paul in Instead of a Letter), 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."

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. 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...." 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, I much prefer thinking of them as surprising and very gratifying friends."

Athill died at a hospice in London on 23 January 2019, aged 101, following a short illness.

Her nephew and heir, the art historian Philip Athill, is managing director of the dealership and gallery, Abbott and Holder.

Selected bibliography Fiction 1962: An Unavoidable Delay, short stories 1967: Don't Look at Me Like That: A Novel. London: Chatto & Windus. New edition, Granta Books, 2001. 2011: Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, short stories. London: Persephone Books.

Autobiography 1963: Instead of a Letter. London: Chatto & Windus. New edition, Granta Books, 2001. 1986: After a Funeral – winner of the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape. 1993: Make Believe. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Reprinted, Granta Books, 2012. 2000: Stet: A Memoir, London: Granta Books. 2002: Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood. London: Granta Books. 2008: Somewhere Towards the End – winner of Costa Prize for Biography. London: Granta Books. 2009: Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill. London: Granta Books. 2011: Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend. London: Granta Books. 2015: Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter. London: Granta Books. 2016: A Florence Diary. London: Granta Books.