Nigella Lawson

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Nigella Lucy Lawson (born 6 January, 1960) is an English journalist, cookery writer, and television presenter.

1 Biography
2 Career
3 Bibliography
4 External links
5 See also

[edit] Biography

Lawson grew up in a Jewish family; she is the daughter of politician Nigel Lawson (now Lord Lawson) and sister of Dominic Lawson, the former editor of The Sunday Telegraph.

Her mother was socialite Vanessa Salmon, heir to the Lyons Corner House empire; she died of liver cancer in 1985. Her sister Thomasina Lawson died of breast cancer in 1993 while in her early thirties.

Lawson attended Godolphin and Latymer School and Westminster School before graduating from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with a degree in Medieval and Modern Languages.

She was married to journalist John Diamond, with whom she had two children, Cosima and Bruno. Diamond died of throat cancer in 2001. They had met in 1986 when they were both writing for The Sunday Times. She married Charles Saatchi (17 years her senior) in September 2003. Lawson came under some criticism when it was discovered that she started her affair with Saatchi before the death of Diamond, albeit with the latter's consent. (In her newspaper articles she consistently showed a liberal attitude to sexual morality, even coming close to admitting to bisexuality [1].)

[edit] Career

She wrote a restaurant column for the Spectator before becoming deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times in 1986.

She became, among other things, a newspaper-reviewer on BBC1 Sunday-morning TV programme Breakfast with Frost.

She co-hosted, with David Aaronovitch, Channel 4 books discussion programme Booked in the late 1990s, and was an occasional compere of BBC2's press review What the Papers Say, as well as appearing on BBC radio.

Following slots as a culinary sidekick on Nigel Slater's Real Food Show on Channel 4, she has fronted three eponymous TV cookery series broadcast in the UK on the channel: two series of Nigella Bites in 1999-2001, plus a 2001 Christmas special; and Forever Summer with Nigella in 2002, both of which yielded accompanying recipe books. She hosted a daytime TV programme on ITV1 in 2005 titled Nigella, in which celebrity guests joined her in a studio kitchen. The show was not well received by critics and ended after a short run. Besides her own cookbooks, Nigella is featured in Off Duty: The World's Greatest Chefs Cook at Home (2005). A third series called Nigella Feasts, based on her book Feast, debuted on the USA's Food Network in Fall 2006.

Her style of presentation is sometimes gently mocked by comedians and commentators (particularly in a regularly-occurring impersonation of her in the BBC television comedy series Dead Ringers) who perceive that she plays overtly upon her attractiveness and sexuality as a device to engage viewers of her cookery programmes, despite Lawson's repeated denials that she does so.

According to UKTV Food Lawson is worth in excess of £1.7 million. She was voted author of the year at the 2001 British Book Awards. More than 2 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide. She also has a profitable line of kitchenware, called the "Living Kitchen" range [2], available at numerous retailers [3].

Her first biography, Nigella Lawson by Gilly Smith, was published by Andre Deutsch in September 2005, but was remaindered within weeks of release. However, a paperback edition, subtitled "A Very British Dish", was due to be published in the summer of 2006.

She took part in the third series of the BBC family-history documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, in an edition first broadcast on 11 October 2006. She traced her mother's side of the family (the Salmon (originally Solomon) family, owners of J. Lyons and Co.) to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors in the Netherlands and the Rhineland of Germany. One of these ancestors, Coenraad Sammes aka Joseph, had fled to England to escape a prison sentence following a conviction for theft. Nigella was disappointed not to have Sephardi ancestry in her family.

[edit] Bibliography

How to Eat: Pleasures and Principles of Good Food, Chatto and Windus, (1999) or John Wiley & Sons, (ISBN 0-471-25750-8, 2002)
How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, Chatto and Windus, (ISBN 0-7011-6888-9, 2000)
Nigella Bites, Chatto and Windus, (ISBN 0-7011-7287-8, 2001)
Forever Summer with Nigella, Chatto and Windus, (ISBN 0-7011-7381-5, 2002)
Forever Summer, Hyperion, (ISBN 1-4013-0016-2, 2003)
Feast: Food to Celebrate Life, Chatto and Windus, (ISBN 0-7011-7521-4, 2004) or Hyperion (ISBN 1-4013-0136-3, 2004)

[edit] External links

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