Diana Athill, literary editor and writer, dies at age 101
Diana Athill, a writer and editor who honed the work of novelists including John Updike and Margaret Atwood before finding late-life fame as a frank and fearless memoirist, has died. She was 101.
Publisher Granta Books said Athill died Wednesday after a short illness.
Born to a wealthy English family in London in 1917, Athill worked for the BBC during the Second World War. After the war, she co-founded the Andre Deutsch publishing house that bore her co-founder's name. She worked there as an editor for five decades, nurturing writers including Updike, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Jean Rhys, Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant and V.S. Naipaul.
One of the first successes for the fledgling enterprise was Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, which Athill later said "nobody else would touch because of how rude it was."
The book's British publication was held up by a court injunction before the attorney general declared that it could be published.
"If it had been banned ... we would have gone bust," Athill said.
"I loved editing," Athill told the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs in 2004. "Mind you, when you had a really good writer like Vidia Naipaul or Jean Rhys, you didn't really have to do any. Because they would put in a manuscript that was perfect. All you had to do was be encouraging and make soothing noises and say, 'Aren't you wonderful, darling.'"
After achieving a great deal of success as an editor, Athill started writing her first memoir Instead of a Letter at the age of 43. She told Eleanor Wachtel in 2009 that "it was a lovely discovery to find that I could write."
"I was groping my way into the fact that I could write. I had been working on writing all that time in publishing. I loved having books all my life," said Athill on Writers & Company.
"When Instead of a Letter began, I had not planned it at all. I never knew what the next paragraph would be. It was almost like automatic writing. An extraordinary experience. I enjoyed every second of it."
Instead of a Letter — an account of an unhappy wartime love affair — was published in 1963 and went on to produce several more volumes, recounting a long and eventful life as a woman in a male-dominated literary world.
In 2008, she published Somewhere Towards The End, a book about coming to terms with aging and death. The book won the Costa Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.
Athill's sharp, unsentimental accounts of her professional and personal life — including relationships with Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali and Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord — drew wide praise and a large readership.
"I just like writing to be clear and concise," Athill told the Guardian in a webchat in 2017. "I don't like a lot of words. This is my nature. I like to keep things simple and very much as they really are. I'm not one for fantasy and I'm not one for exaggerated writing."
Athill says her love for books started at her grandmother's house, where she spent a great deal of her childhood.
Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing said Athill's writing "was somehow exactly like herself: formidable, truthful, often amusing."
"We will miss her indomitable spirit," Rausing said.
The writer and editor spoke to Eleanor Wachtel on Writers & Company in 2001 and again in 2009. You can listen to both those conversations below:
— with files from CBC Books