Diana Souhami

Diana Souhami (born 25 August 1940) is an English writer of biographies, short stories and plays. She is noted for her unconventional biographies of prominent lesbians.

Biography

Souhami was brought up in London and studied philosophy at University of Hull. Before turning to writing biography, she worked in the publications department of the BBC. While there, she published short stories, wrote plays that were performed at Edinburgh Festival, The Kings Head in Islington, and broadcast as radio and television plays by the BBC. She devised an exhibition for the British Council called A Woman's Place: The Changing Picture of Women in Britain, which in 1984 toured 30 countries. Her book based on this exhibition was published by Penguin Books. She also reviewed books and plays for newspapers. In 1986 she was approached by Pandora Press and received a commission to write a biography of the artist Gluck.

Her life of Gluck was her only book in which she used a birth-to-death approach until her life of Edith Cavell (2010). "We don't live our lives or read in a linear fashion. Also, the internet has so much information that it rather absolves the biographer from being a storehouse of knowledge."

Souhami became a full-time writer, publishing biographies which mostly explore the most influential and intriguing of 20th century lesbian (and gay) lives. She followed Gluck (1988), with Gertrude and Alice (1991), an account of the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas which lasted from their first meeting to Stein's death in 1946, Greta and Cecil (1994) examining the romantic relationship between Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, and Mrs Keppel and her daughter (1996), a dual biography of Alice Keppel, a long-time mistress of King Edward VII, and her daughter, Violet Trefusis. The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (1998), the biography of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, won the Lambda Literary Award for Biography in 2000 and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

In 2001, she departed from her usual genre to publish Selkirk's Island, an account of Alexander Selkirk's years as a castaway on Isla Más a Tierra (now better known as Robinson Crusoe Island) in the Juan Fernández archipelago. Booksellers and librarians had been puzzling whether to classify the book as fact, fiction, faction, fable or fantasy when it won the 2001 Whitbread Biography Award.

Returning to lesbian biography, Wild Girls (2004) is another dual biography, this time of the American couple Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney, part of the artistic expat community in Paris between the wars. Never a conventional biographer, Souhami places at the start of each chapter a short passage in italics where "she appears to be narrating some of her personal lesbian experiences - waiting in a bar for a blind date, a secret affair with a woman Dean, furtive love-making with a girl on the deck of a Greek ferry at night."

In 2007 Souhami returned to writing about islands with Coconut Chaos, set on and en route to Pitcairn Island. Two stories are intertwined: an investigation into the lives of the HMS Bounty mutineers and their descendants, and a memoir of her journey to the mid-Pacific rock on a freighter with a woman known only as "Lady Myre". She visited at the time of the 2004 Pitcairn Islands sexual assault trial, and although she attempted to travel incognito, the Pitcairn Islanders discovered that she was a writer and asked her to leave. This book was dramatised for BBC radio.

Edith Cavell (2010) is a straightforward biography of the nurse who was executed for her role in the smuggling of allied soldiers out of Belgium during the First World War.

Murder at Wrotham Hill (2012) is an account of the 1946 murder of Dagmar Petrzywalski and the subsequent investigation and prosecution of the crime, near a quiet village in Kent.

Gwendolen (2014) is a re-telling of George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda.

Souhami won the 2021 Polari Prize for No Modernism Without Lesbians.

"I started writing about lesbians 25 years ago in the hope of contributing to breaking the history of silence. Acceptance can't happen without openness, and I believe we should all try to speak out in our own way. If you're silent and invisible you're no trouble to anyone. You're so buried you're assumed not to be there. So, historically, we have to dig deep to shed light on 'these practices', rid them of insult, turn the wrongdoing around, name and shame the abusers." (Souhami quoted by Emily Reynolds)

Works

Books

• A woman's place : the changing picture of women in Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1986. ISBN 9780140086096.
• Gluck, 1895-1978 : her biography. Hammersmith: Pandora. 1988. ISBN 978-0863582363.
• Gertrude and Alice. Hammersmith: Pandora. 1991. ISBN 9780044408338.
• Bakst : the Rothschild panels of the Sleeping beauty. London: Philip Wilson. 1992. ISBN 9780856674198.
• Greta and Cecil. London: Jonathan Cape. 1994. ISBN 9780297643647.
• Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter. London: Harper Collins. 1996. ISBN 9780002556453.
• The Trials of Radclyffe Hall. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1998. ISBN 9780297818250.
• Selkirk's Island. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2001. ISBN 9780297643852.
• Wild girls : Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2004. ISBN 9780297643869.
• Coconut Chaos. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2007. ISBN 9780297847878.
• Edith Cavell. London: Quercus. 2010. ISBN 9781849163613.
• Murder at Wrotham Hill. London: Quercus. 2012. ISBN 9780857382832.
• Gwendolen. London: Quercus. 2014. ISBN 9781782063520.
• No Modernism without Lesbians. London: Head of Zeus. 2020. ISBN 9781786694874.

Television writing

• The Weekend (1976) dir John Bruce production BBC
• Jupiter Moon (1990)

Further reading

Gale Group (1999). Contemporary authors. New revision series, volume 76 : a bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields. Farmington Hills MI: Gale. ISBN 9780787630867.

External links

• Official website
• Diana Souhami at IMDb
• Costa Book Awards past winners