Feature: Talks - Diana Athill at New End Theatre on Sunday December 5

Published: 25 November, 2010
by GERALD ISAAMAN

On the eve of her 93rd birthday, literary star Diana Athill takes to the stage 

SHE will be 93 a few days before Christmas. But, as indomitable as ever, Diana Athill, one of literary London’s legends, will climb on stage at Hampstead’s New End Theatre next month and do her thing.

Diana, now living in a care home in Highgate after half a century spent on the very edge of Primrose Hill, is taking part in the fifth of the theatre’s admired “In Conversation” events, being gently quizzed by Eileen Christopher-Daniels.

And she has much to talk about after a career as an acclaimed literary editor and director of the publishers Andre Deutsch, which brought her into direct contact with writers such as John Updike, Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer and Jean Rhys.

Two years ago she was awarded an OBE for her considerable services to literature and then went on to win the Costa Biography Prize for her poignant memoir Somewhere Towards The End, which provided a singular perspective on age, life experience and the joys of hindsight.

“I love being upfront for a change,” she tells me. “I don’t prepare for stage performances unless asked to give a speech as such. And I have no stage fright, being – I have been assured – a natural.”

It is the kind of confidence you might expect from such a formidable woman, who admits: “I am very wobbly on my feet, but I still have my marbles and my voice still carries.

 “I don’t know what they want from me on our evening on stage, but what I usually talk about is writing a memoir, the pros and cons, or else about the fearful decision to move into an old people’s home.

“I talk about how painful it is to make it and how, in my case, it has turned out wonderfully successful. What I like best is to have someone asking questions – audiences much prefer the spontaneity of the conversational approach.

“It’s much easier to bring them in with their questions after such a performance than it is after a prepared talk.”

She remains nostalgic about her flat in Elsworthy Terrace, which she left on the advice of her friend, the late Rose Hacker. “I came to live there by chance,” she recalls. “A cousin bought house just next to a gate onto Primrose Hill, and wanted to let the top floor just when I needed to move. I loved living there because there are very few parts of London more agreeable, and, in NW3, not many houses more pleasant than that one.

“I still think of Regent’s Park Road as our ‘village’, a dear   little street, and I go  back to it for most of my shopping.”

Despite the new world of technology taking over, she has no fears about a lack of literary masterpieces in the future. 

“I have no doubt that good writing will go on, in whatever form,” she insists. “New techniques need getting used to, but the creative instinct will survive.”

• Diana Athill is at New End on Sunday  December 5 at 7.30pm. Tickets £5 from the box office: 0870 033 2733