Victoria Glendinning

Hon Victoria Glendinning CBE (23 April 1937) is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.

She was born in Sheffield to a Quaker family, Her father was Baron Seebohm. Glendinning grew up near York and went to the University of Oxford to study modern languages. In the second year of her degree, she married one of her Spanish lecturers, Professor Nigel Glendinning in 1958. They divorced in 1981. Her second husband Terence de Vere White died of Parkinson's disease in 1994 and she remarried in 1996. She had four sons (before she was 28) including Matthew Glendinning, with whom she coauthored the book Sons and Mothers, and the mathematician Paul Glendinning. Another son, Simon Glendinning, lectures in European Philosophy at the London School of Economics having previously taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury. [Wikipedia]