Anne Chisholm
Non-fiction writer
About
Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who has also worked in journalism and publishing. Her first biography, Nancy Cunard (1979), won the Silver PEN prize for non-fiction; in 1992 the biography of Lord Beaverbrook she wrote jointly with her husband, Michael Davie, was runner up for the Hawthornden prize. Her most recent book was a life of the writer Rumer Godden (1998) and she is currently writing the biography of the diarist Frances Partridge.
As a journalist, her first job was on Private Eye; subsequently she was on the staff of Time Magazine in New York and of the Observer. At present, she reviews regularly for the Sunday Telegraph. She has worked as a reader and occasional editor for Jonathan Cape and Bloomsbury, and was a Booker Prize judge (1995); she has been a judge for the Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction and for the V.S. Pritchett short story prize.
In 2003 she was a visiting Fellow in the British Studies programme at the University of Texas; she has run, with Caroline Moorehead, two Arvon Foundation courses in life writing. She is a Fellow and council member of the Royal Society of Literature.