Jenny Diski FRSL (née Simmonds; 8 July 1947 – 28 April 2016) was an English writer. She had a troubled childhood, but was taken in and mentored by the novelist Doris Lessing; she lived in Lessing's house for four years. Diski was educated at University College London, and worked as a teacher during the 1970s and early 1980s. Diski was a regular contributor to the London Review of Books; the collections Don't and A View from the Bed include articles and essays written for the publication. She won the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions. Early life Diski was a troubled teenager from a difficult, fractured home. Her parents were working-class Jewish immigrants to London. Her father, James Simmonds (born Israel Zimmerman), made his living on the black market. He deserted the family when Diski was aged six. This caused her mother, Rene (born Rachel Rayner), to have a nervous breakdown, and Diski was then put into foster care. Her father came back, but left permanently when she was aged eleven. Diski spent much of her youth as a psychiatric inpatient or outpatient. At the same time, she immersed herself deeply in the culture of the 60s, from the Aldermaston marches to the Grosvenor Square Protests of 1968, from drugs to free love, from jazz to acid rock, and a flirtation with the ideas and methods of R. D. Laing. Taken into the London home of the novelist Doris Lessing, who was a school-friend's mother, Diski resumed her education and by the start of the 1970s was training as a teacher, starting the Freightliners free school and having her first publication. Writings Over the decades, Diski was a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction articles, reviews and books. Many of her early books tackle themes such as depression, sado-masochism and madness. Some of her later writings, such as Apology for the Woman Writing (about the French writer Marie de Gournay), strike a more positive note, while her spare, ironic tone, using all the resources of magic realism, provides a unique take on even the most distressing material. Compared at times with her mentor Lessing as both were concerned with the thinking woman, Diski was called a post-postmodernist for her abiding distrust of logical systems of thought, whether postmodern or not. Fiction Diski wrote eleven novels. Her first novel