Diana begins the day by opening the many letters she still receives from admiring readers. For these portraits, she was photographed in her room in Highgate on 2 June 2016.

Diana
Athill I Think being dead es an expensive business

Diana Athill / Creo que estar muerto es un asunto caro

Text by Erica Wagner
Portraits by Alasdair McLellan

---

Issue n° 14, Autumn & Winter 2016

Diana Athill, 98, has a beady eye and a way with words. She used both on the likes of Jean Rhys and Philip Roth during her 50 years as London’s most respected literary editor. But for the past 15, she’s turned that gaze on her own storied life with eight volumes of autobiography. Erica Wagner met Diana at the residential home where she lives and works.

Maggie Shipstead

BOOK OF THE DAY 

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead review – parallel lives take flight

Analysis / The 2021 Booker shortlist tunes in to the worries of our age

Nadifa Mohamed is sole British writer to make Booker prize shortlist

Booker Prize 2021 shortlist unveiled as race for £50,000 prize hots up

Erica Wagner
Wednesday 26 May 2021

The early history of aviation is full of courageous, fascinating women: Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart are probably the best known. With the fictional Marian Graves, Maggie Shipstead creates a compelling, original heroine all her own. In this enthralling novel, Graves disappeared in 1950 while attempting to fly around the world – longitudinally, passing over both north and south poles. By that time she was, as the reader will learn, an accomplished aviator, a woman obsessed with flight since her girlhood in the wilds of Montana. She and her navigator, Eddie Bloom, vanished somewhere over the Ross ice shelf, on the very last leg of their journey, heading up towards New Zealand.