Jenny Diski made a fairly late start to her writing career; she was nearly in her forties by the time she published her first novel. During the 1990s she established a reputation as an intelligent novelist and essayist who accepted the challenges of uncomfortable subject matter and adopted an original approach to it. The rigorous exploration of contemporary thinking has been the dominant force in her writing, though she has also shown awareness of the experiments with narrative notable in much modern fiction.

Diski was born Jennifer Simmonds in London on 8 July 1947, the only child of a second marriage for both parents. Her father, James Simmonds, formerly Zimmerman, was a first-generation East End Jew, as was her mother, born Rachel Rayner. The family lived for Simmonds's first eleven years at Paramount Court, a block of flats in Tottenham Court Road in central London. As a black marketeer, Simmonds's...