Diski, Jenny

The British author Jenny Diski was born in London as Jenny Simmonds. She had a traumatic childhood with a father who abandoned his family and a mentally ill mother who was in care. Jenny was expelled from public school, experimented with drugs and spent time in a number of institutions; experiences that came to inform her writing. She worked as a teacher in the 1970s and early ‘80s and she attended University College, London, between 1982 and 1984. Jenny Diski regularly contributed to The Observer and the London Review of Books and she wrote television screenplays. At the end of her life, Jenny Diski lived in Cambridge.