Diana Athill: Celebrated writer and editor who worked with Margaret Atwood and VS Naipaul dies aged 101

Diana Athill, the writer, novelist and editor who worked with authors including Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul, has died aged 101, publisher Granta has confirmed.

Athill was born during an air raid on London in 1917. She studied English at Oxford and worked for the BBC during Second World War, before helping Andre Deutsch found his eponymous publishing house, where she worked for the next five decades.

She told the New Statesman in 2012 that being an editor, for the most part, was a “simple thing”. “We would not have published a novel if we couldn’t have published it as it came in,” she said. “Then, I just worked to polish it up a bit.” She called herself a “nanny” rather than an editor for writers such as Naipaul, whose work attracted praise for Athill’s skills as an editor. “I didn’t do a thing to that text,” she insisted. “I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything.”

An account of her 50 years in publishing, Stet, was released in 2000, with a volume about her childhood in Norfolk, Yesterday Morning, published two years later. She never married but enjoyed a number of affairs with men, including an eight-year affair with the Jamaican playright Barry Reckord, with whom she lived for 40 years, describing their relationship as a “detached” sort of marriage. These relationships, detailed in her indiscreet memoirs including 2009’s Costa Prize-winning Somewhere Towards the End, caused scandal and delight in equal measure.

Athill was the subject of a BBC documentary, Growing Old Disgracefully, in 2010. She appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2004 and guest edited the Today programme in 2010. She received an OBE in the 2009 New Year’s Honours.

“How does one describe Diana’s work?” Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing asked. “Writers are sometimes startingly different from their writing, offering a front to the world either through their personas or their words, or perhaps a combination of both. Diana’s work, by contrast, was somehow exactly like herself: formidable, truthful, often amusing. She was a soldier for clarity and precision, a clever and competent young woman brought by a combination of forces to a heady mix of London publishing and post-war love affairs.”

open image in gallery

“It is tempting to see one as the counterpoint of the other – sexual passion vs editorial discipline. I think the combination strengthened her, certainly as a writer and probably as an editor (and lover) too. She had, in any case, the rare ability to grow seemingly stronger, not weaker, with everything life brought her, transcening the prejudices of her day and learning from mistakes. And what a writer she was. You can faintly perceive trades of Diana, the fluid rhythm, the steady intelligence, even in the books she edited – I am thinking particularly of Jo Langer’s fine memoir of bleak and dangerous post-war Prague, My Life With a Good Communist.

“Diana was an institution at Granta. News of – yet another! – new book was always greeted with unanimous glee and joy in acquisitions meetings. We will miss her indomitable spirit.”