Diana Souhami

October 2024

Not yet finished writing my memoir. I hope/plan to get a first draft done by the end of the year. I am worse than late with delivery.

This July I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Don’t know who nominated me but I and 29 others were ‘inducted’. The President Bernadine Evaristo announced us, then we signed our names in the Roll Book which has the signatures of two centuries of Fellows. We were invited to choose a famous writer’s pen: George Eliot’s, Lord Byron’s, Jean Rhys’s, Andrea Levy’s, Arnold Wesker’s, T.S Eliot’s – or Charles Dickens’s quill. I chose Jean Rhys’s pen. I wrote to her in 1976 after she published a book of stories Sleep It Off Lady. This was her reply:

After the induction we joined the Society’s summer party. Grayson Perry was there in a rather awful well-made frock.

Another indication of my becoming an almost significant dead person is the portrait of me that now hangs in the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. It’s by Sadie Lee and was commissioned by Annie Bartlett and her partner Sandra Evans. Sadie chose the clothes. They link me to the biographies I’ve written of Radclyffe Hall, Romaine Brooks, Gertrude Stein, Bryher and other gender queer women.

No Modernism without Lesbians

Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer.

They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris.

Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves their stories into those of the four central women to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-War Paris. [ Read more ]

I began writing books about lesbians in the 1980s. I have twice won the US Lambda Literary Award for best gay writing. In 2014 in the UK I was named a Rainbow List National Treasure in the Lifetime Achievement category… Two of my books, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall and Coconut Chaos, have been broadcast as BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’. The Radclyffe Hall book was also shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter was a New York Times ‘Notable Book of the Year’ and featured on BBC 4’s ‘A Good Read’. My first book Gluck: Her Biography was recently the basis for a BBC documentary and an exhibition at the Brighton Art Gallery. Among other titles Selkirk’s Island won the Whitbread biography award, Edith Cavell won East Anglia Book of the Year and Murder at Wrotham Hill was shortlisted for a Crime Writers Golden Dagger Award.

Bakst: The Rothschild Panels of The Sleeping Beauty