Prolific novelist and essayist who wrote a regular column about her diagnosis with inoperable cancer for the London Review of Books, has died

The author Jenny Diski, who had been writing a serialised diary about her inoperable cancer since being diagnosed in 2014, has died.

The news was announced on Twitter by Diski’s partner, Ian Patterson, whom she referred to in her writing as “the Poet”. “Sad news. My darling Jenny @diski died early this morning,” tweeted Patterson, to an avalanche of condolences from his fellow writers.

Ian Patterson (@paftersnu) Sad news. My darling Jenny @diski died early this morning.

In Gratitude by Jenny Diski review – cancer, contrariness and Doris Lessing Read more

The author of novels, short stories, essays, memoirs and travelogues, Diski published 18 books. Only last week, her memoir In Gratitude was published, chronicling her life since she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August 2014, and given “two or three years” to live by her doctor. “Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing,” she writes in the diary which was serialised in the London Review of Books, revealing how her first reaction on learning the news was to make a Breaking Bad joke: “We’d better get cooking the meth.”

“She deserves our unfeigned admiration, not for her bravery or her struggle, or any irrelevant tosh like that, but for writing so well,” said Andrew Brown in the Guardian of her cancer essays, while the New York Times said they were “a marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation, [and] bracingly devoid of sententiousness, sentimentality or any kind of spiritual urge or twitch”.

Her agent Peter Straus said Diski “didn’t know how to react” when she was diagnosed. “All responses felt scripted, laden with cliché. Being a writer, she decided to write about it. Bloomsbury worked hard to produce [In Gratitude] before she died and we were all delighted she managed to hold it in her hands,” Straus said.

Alexandra Pringle, who edited In Gratitude at Bloomsbury, said that she first worked with Diski years ago, when she was publishing her novel Happily Ever After, “about a badly behaved 68-year-old woman called Daphne”. “We had a good time, and a lot of laughs, and then I became a literary agent and she moved on. We were reunited when Jenny was herself a badly behaved 68-year-old – and dying,” Pringle said.

Pringle called Diski “always funny, demanding, acerbic, strangely sweet and incredibly clever”, and said she “longed to be alive for the book’s publication”.

“She became increasingly ill and one day she tweeted that she had two months left to live. I tweeted back: ‘Jenny the deal is: we publish in two months. You stay alive.’ She replied: ‘Really hard deal to choose,’” said Pringle. “Very quickly, the first copy was delivered to her in Cambridge. Straus and I went to see Jenny and it was marvellous to see her joy as she held it in her hands. On publication day last Thursday I called her. She was struggling to speak, but said that although it’s not in her nature to admit these things, ‘it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful’.”

Jenny Diski on Doris Lessing: ‘I was the cuckoo in the nest’ Read more

Diski’s memoir also tells the story of how she was taken in at the age of 15 by the novelist Doris Lessing, and of their relationship over the next 50 years, as Diski herself became a writer. Writing in the Guardian two weeks ago, Blake Morrison said that it “works on many levels: as a memoir of an unusual adolescence; as an essay on family dysfunction; as an intimate mini-biography of a Nobel prize-winning novelist; and as an unillusioned meditation on illness and death”, but “at its heart, though, is the story of a difficult relationship between women, both, as it happens, outstanding writers”.



“What I liked was her abrasiveness - she was tough, not least on herself. Whatever subject she took on – rape, depression, the 60s, Antarctica – she had something new and surprising to say,” Blake Morrison told the Guardian on Thursday. “She really came into her own over the last 15 years or so, particularly with her non-fiction. Some of the diaries and reviews she published in the London Review of Books were small masterpieces.”

London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers said Diski was “stylish and daring and more than most she did what she wanted to do and said what she wanted to say. She was also both fierce and understanding and that isn’t all that usual.”

Jenny Diski in quotes: 'Nobody is better at having cancer than me' Read more

Award-winning novelist Jenn Ashworth said that she first met Diski as an undergraduate.

“Like Jenny, I had the kind of background that didn’t make it easy for me to imagine myself as a writer – and when I turned up at Cambridge with two pairs of jeans and not a single ounce of social capital, she insisted others respected me and most of all, that I respected myself. I have carried that influence with me ever since,” Ashworth told the Guardian.