Liz Hodgkinson

Liz Hodgkinson (born 1945) is a British author and journalist who has written more than 50 books. Her books have been translated into over 20 languages. She has also written articles for most of the major British national newspapers in London, and for magazines for women. She has taught journalism for a decade.

Early life Hodgkinson was born Elizabeth Garrett, and grew up, in the small Cambridgeshire town of St Neots.

She attended Huntingdon Grammar School, which was co-educational and which is now named Hinchingbrooke School. At the school, she became a close friend of Amaryllis Garnett and was influenced by the bohemian household of David and Angelica Garnett. She has written that her parents would have been happy enough for her to leave school at 16 and train as a secretary. "They had no idea of higher education or careers." However, she wanted more from a career, so she attended Durham University where she studied English. Hodgkinson has written that her period at university was dominated by an obsession she developed for a male student, which began at first sight and was to overshadow her subsequent relationships.

Career After a short stint teaching, Hodgkinson became a freelance reporter and columnist. At first, in the years 1966–1970, she worked in Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England, on the Thomson Newspapers the Evening Chronicle, the Newcastle Journal, and the Sunday Sun.

During these years, she married Neville Hodgkinson, also a journalist, who would also become a Daily Mail science and medical columnist and author of books. The couple's sons, Tom and Will, have both became journalists and authors like their parents.

The family moved to London, to a house in Richmond, and (like her husband) Hodgkinson gained a series of jobs in Fleet Street. In 1971–1972, Hodgkinson was Deputy Editor of the mother and baby magazine Modern Mother (long since closed), and then in 1972–1973 she worked as a columnist on the London Evening News. He moved to the Brahma Kumaris retreat centre at Nuneham House, Oxfordshire.

In the late 1980s, possibly as part of this personal crisis, although theirs was an amicable divorce, she began to think about the subject of how people can deal with such situations, and published a book on celibacy as a solution to personal problems. She followed that with Bodyshock, a journalism book on transsexuality.

After her divorce, she again suffered obsessive thoughts about a male student from her university days. She sought psychotherapy and wrote a book on the experience: "I believe that with obsessive love, time is no healer at all. The experience of obsessive love can be likened to dropping a stitch in knitting, and never picking it up. The knitting never quite looks right from then on, unless we unpick it and start again from the mistake." She became friends with journalist John Sandilands, then saw him as her partner; and for many years they shared a holiday flat in Worthing, West Sussex; but she has lived alone since his death in 2004. She has (as of late 2016) between them given her five grandchildren.

She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Guild of Health Writers and the National Landlords’ Association.