Diana Souhami

Diana Souhami (born 25 August 1940) is an award-winning English writer of biographies, short stories and plays.

Souhami was brought up in London and studied philosophy at Hull University. She worked in the publications department of the BBC before turning to biography. While working at the BBC she published short stories, wrote plays which were performed at Edinburgh Festival, The Kings Head in Islington and broadcast as radio and television plays by the BBC. She devised an exhibition: A Woman's Place: The Changing Picture of Women in Britain for the British Council which in 1984 toured 30 countries. Her book based on this exhibition was published by Penguin Books. She also reviewed books and plays for newspapers. In 1986 she was approached by Pandora Press and received a commission to write a biography of Hannah Gluckstein.

Her life of Gluck was her only book in which she used a birth-to-death approach until her life of Edith Cavell (2010). "We don't live our lives or read in a linear fashion. Also, the internet has so much information that it rather absolves the biographer from being a storehouse of knowledge."

Souhami became a full-time writer publishing biographies which mostly explore the most influential and intriguing of 20th century lesbian (and gay lives). She followed Gluck (1988), with Gertrude and Alice (1991) an account of the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas which lasted from their first meeting to Stein’s death in 1946, Greta and Cecil (1994) examining the romantic relationship between Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, and Mrs Keppel and her daughter (1996) a dual biography of Alice Keppel, a long-time mistress of King Edward VII, and her daughter, Violet Trefusis. The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (1998), the biography of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall won the Lambda Literary Award for Biography in 2000 and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

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