Juliet Nicolson is a writer and journalist.
After leaving Oxford in 1976 where she studied English Literature, she worked in publishing for thirty years on both sides of the Atlantic. After a subsequent and disastrous episode as a literary agent in which her only identifiable success was the Elton John Flower Book, she began to write ‘at a mature age,’ encouraged by writer and brother Adam.
Juliet has now written three books of social history: The Perfect Summer, the story of the very hot summer of 1911, The Great Silence, the story of three consecutive November 11ths after the First World War and her latest book Frostquake, which focuses on the story of the freezing winter of 1962 which will be published next February. Journalist Tina Brown has commented on these tightly focussed stories by saying ‘Juliet has invented a new way of telling history’.
Juliet is also the author of A House Full of Daughters, a BBC Book of the Week, in which she traces the patterns that interlaced seven generations of her own family including her great grandmother Pepita, an exotic flamenco dancer from Malaga, her grandmother writer and gardener Vita Sackville West and Juliet herself, her childhood at Sissinghurst and her struggle to confront the family gene of addiction.
She lives in East Sussex with her husband Charlie, a former diplomat and communications director. She has two wonderful daughters and four fantastic grandchildren.