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." Personal life She married Roger Marks in 1976, and they jointly chose the name Diski. Their daughter Chloe was born in 1977. 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. In June 2014, Diski was told that she had at best another three years to live. In September 2014, she announced that she had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. She died on 28 April 2016. Prizes 2003 J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions Works Fiction Nothing Natural (1986) Rainforest (1987) Like Mother (1988) Then Again (1990) Happily Ever After (1991) Monkey's Uncle (1994) The Vanishing Princess (1995) (short stories) The Dream Mistress (1996) After These Things (2004) Only Human: A Comedy (2000) Apology for the Woman Writing (2008) Non-fiction Skating to Antarctica (1997) (memoir; Chapter 1) Don't (1998) (essays) Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions (2002) (travelogue) A View from the Bed (2003) (essays) On Trying to Keep Still (2006) The Sixties (2009) (memoir) What I Don’t Know About Animals (2010) (nature) In Gratitude (2016) (memoir) Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? (2020) (essays) References External links Jenny Diski's blog Diski's writings at the LRB 1947 births 2016 deaths Deaths from lung cancer Place of death missing English travel writers British women travel writers English women novelists Environmental fiction writers Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature English Jewish writers People educated at St Christopher School, Letchworth 20th-century English novelists 20th-century English women writers 21st-century English novelists 21st-century English women writers English women non-fiction writers