Jenny Diski author page

Jenny Diski biography

Jenny Diski (née Jennifer Simmonds) was an English writer, essayist, and memoirist. She contributed regularly to the London Review of Books, with over two hundred articles published during her career.

Her fiction output includes eleven novels. Her debut, Nothing Natural (1986), dealt with a controversial relationship and marked her entry into literary fiction. Her 1987 novel Rainforest explores themes of identity and psychological stress across diverse settings. She also published the short-story collection The Vanishing Princess.

In non-fiction, Diski wrote travel and memoir works including Skating to Antarctica (1997) and Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions (2002). Her essays and journalism have been collected in volumes such as Don’t and Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?

Diski received the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 2003 for Stranger on a Train. She was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2014 she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and used her experience in a series of London Review of Books essays, later collected as In Gratitude. Jenny Diski died on 28 April 2016.