Jenny Diski
| Jenny Diski | |
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Diski (standing) with her rescuer and mentor Doris Lessing in 1963
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| Born | Jennifer Simmonds 8 July 1947 London, England |
| Died | 28 April 2016 (aged 68) |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Genre | Autobiography, fiction, non-fiction, screenplay, travel |
| Website | |
| jennydiski |
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Jenny Diski FRSL (née Simmonds; 8 July 1947 – 28 April 2016) was an English writer. Diski had a troubled childhood, but was rescued by the older novelist Doris Lessing; she lived in Lessing's house for four years. Diski was educated at University College London, and worked as a teacher during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Diski was a regular contributor to the London Review of Books; the collections Don't and A View from the Bed include articles and essays written for the publication. She won the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.
Diski was a troubled teenager from a difficult, fractured home. Her parents were working-class Jewish immigrants to London. Her father, James Simmonds (born Israel Zimmerman), made his living on the black market. Her father deserted the family when Jenny was aged six. This caused her mother, Rene (born Rachel Rayner), to have a nervous breakdown, and Jenny was then put into foster care for a first time. Her father came back, but left forever when she was aged eleven. Diski spent much of her youth as a psychiatric in- or outpatient. At the same time, she immersed herself deeply in the culture of the '60s, from the Aldermaston marches to the Grosvenor Square protests, from drugs to free love, from jazz to acid rock, and a flirtation with the ideas and methods of R. D. Laing. Taken into the London home of a school-friend’s mother, the novelist Doris Lessing, Diski resumed her education; and by the start of the 1970s was training as a teacher, starting the Freightliners free school, and making her first publication.
Over the decades, Diski was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction articles, reviews and books. Many of her early books tackle such troubling if absorbing themes as depression, sado-masochism, and madness. However, some of her later writings, such as Apology for the Woman Writing, strike a more positive note; while her spare, ironic tone, using all the resources of magic realism, provides a unique take on even the most distressing material. Compared at times to her mentor Lessing for their joint interest in the thinking woman, Diski was called a post-postmodern for her abiding distrust of logical systems of thought, whether postmodern or not.
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Wikipedia