Age, Biography and Wiki

Jenny Diski (Jennifer Simmonds) was born on 8 July, 1947 in London, England, is an English writer. Discover Jenny Diski's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. Learn How rich is she in this year and how she spends money? Also learn how she earned most of networth at the age of 68 years old?

Popular As Jennifer Simmonds
Occupation Writer
Age 68 years old
Zodiac Sign Cancer
Born 8 July, 1947
Birthday 8 July
Birthplace London, England
Date of death 28 April, 2016
Died Place N/A
Nationality London, England

We recommend you to check the complete list of Famous People born on 8 July. She is a member of famous writer with the age 68 years old group.

Jenny Diski Height, Weight & Measurements

At 68 years old, Jenny Diski height not available right now. We will update Jenny Diski's Height, weight, Body Measurements, Eye Color, Hair Color, Shoe & Dress size soon as possible.

Physical Status
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Dating & Relationship status

She is currently single. She is not dating anyone. We don't have much information about She's past relationship and any previous engaged. According to our Database, She has no children.

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Jenny Diski Net Worth

Her net worth has been growing significantly in 2023-2024. So, how much is Jenny Diski worth at the age of 68 years old? Jenny Diski’s income source is mostly from being a successful writer. She is from London, England. We have estimated Jenny Diski's net worth, money, salary, income, and assets.

Net Worth in 2024 $1 Million - $5 Million
Salary in 2024 Under Review
Net Worth in 2023 Pending
Salary in 2023 Under Review
House Not Available
Cars Not Available
Source of Income writer

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Timeline

1947

Jenny Diski FRSL (née Simmonds; 8 July 1947 – 28 April 2016) was an English writer.

She had a troubled childhood, but was taken in and mentored by the novelist Doris Lessing; she lived in Lessing's house for four years.

1968

At the same time, she immersed herself deeply in the culture of the 60s, from the Aldermaston marches to the Grosvenor Square Protests of 1968, from drugs to free love, from jazz to acid rock, and a flirtation with the ideas and methods of R. D. Laing.

1970

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.

Taken into the London home of the novelist Doris Lessing, who was a school-friend's mother, Diski resumed her education and by the start of the 1970s was training as a teacher, starting the Freightliners free school and having her first publication.

Over the decades, Diski was a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction articles, reviews and books.

Many of her early books tackle themes such as depression, sado-masochism and madness.

Some of her later writings, such as Apology for the Woman Writing (about the French writer Marie de Gournay), 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 with her mentor Lessing as both were concerned with the thinking woman, Diski was called a post-postmodernist for her abiding distrust of logical systems of thought, whether postmodern or not.

Diski wrote eleven novels.

Her first novel Nothing Natural was about a sadomasochistic affair.

1976

She married Roger Marks in 1976, and they jointly chose the name Diski.

1977

Their daughter Chloe was born in 1977.

1980

In the book, Diski returns repeatedly to the question of how far the cult of the self in the permissive society gave rise to 1980s neoliberalism, greed and self-interest.

She concludes that, in the words of Charles Shaar Murray, "The line from hippie to yuppie is not nearly as convoluted as people like to believe".

1981

The couple separated in 1981 and divorced.

Her later partner until the end of her life, Ian Patterson, known as "the Poet" in Diski's writings, is a poet, translator and was director of English Studies at Queens' College, Cambridge.

1995

Her only collection of short stories, The Vanishing Princess, published in England in 1995, was described as being about "pleasure, the writing life, the difficulties of family life, and the rules governing femininity."

In The Sixties, Diski described her experience as a young woman starting out in life: "I lived in London during that period, regretting the Beats, buying clothes, going to movies, dropping out, reading, taking drugs, spending time in mental hospitals, demonstrating, having sex, teaching".

She also described the decade's pervasive sexism, institutionalised in the countercultural cult of casual sex, asserting that "On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn't take no for an answer".

1997

Her 1997 memoir Skating to Antarctica, ostensibly about a journey to see the Antarctic ice, also tells much about Diski's early life.

Kirkus Reviews comments that "Antarctica is not so much a destination as a symptom in this intense, disturbing memoir of a wickedly unpleasant childhood."

Diski likens the bleak whiteness of the icescape to the safety of the unbroken whiteness of the psychiatric hospital of her depressed youth.

In her obituary of Diski, Kate Kellaway calls Skating to Antarctica "the most remarkable of her books. It stars her daughter, Chloe, who steers Diski into finding out what became of her mother, with whom relations had been severed for decades. The narrative alternates startlingly between a trip to the frozen south and this search—Diski's reluctant advance towards catharsis."

2003

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.

He deserted the family when Diski was aged six.

This caused her mother, Rene (born Rachel Rayner), to have a nervous breakdown, and Diski was then put into foster care.

Her father came back, but left permanently when she was aged eleven.

Diski spent much of her youth as a psychiatric inpatient or outpatient.

2010

Her 2010 non-fiction work, What I Don't Know About Animals, examines the ambiguous status of pet animals in Western society, at once sentimentalised and brutalised, or all too often abandoned.

Nicholas Lezard, reviewing the book in The Guardian, admires Diski as "one of the language's great, if under-appreciated, stylists", in this case where "her honest, direct and intelligent prose has produced an honest, direct and intelligent look at relations between ourselves and the animal world."

2014

In June 2014, Diski was told that she had at best another three years to live.

2016

Diski's final, valedictory, book, In Gratitude, was published shortly before her death in 2016.

In it, she "elegant[ly]" takes a tour of her life, knowing she was soon to die of an aggressive and inoperable cancer.

She rejects the usual "cancer clichés", instead going back to her time with Lessing, meeting other famous literary figures including Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe, Lindsay Anderson, and R. D. Laing.

The Kirkus reviewer sums up the book as "Sometimes rueful, often oblique, but provocative and highly readable."