Respected author and editor Diana Athill, 101

Author Diana Athill, known for her frank accounts of her life, has died at the age of 101, publisher Granta announced.

The writer and editor, who died on Wednesday night after a short illness, published eight memoirs.

She wrote about her passions – gardening, fashion, family and her continuing old age – throughout her 90s.

Previously, she wrote frankly about her love life and did not shy away from the subject of sex as an older woman.

As well as the memoirs, she published a novel and a collection of stories and letters.

Somewhere Towards The End (2008), a frank look at old age, won the Costa Biography Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Aged 91, she was the oldest-ever categorywinning author in the history of the awards.

She wrote about living in a residential home in Alive, Alive Oh!

She “embraced her new home”, Granta said, “despite having to give up the required number of books to fit into her room there”.

Athill worked for the BBC throughout the Second World War and helped establish the publishing company Andre Deutsch.

Her memoirs included Instead Of A Letter (1963), After A Funeral (1986), Yesterday Morning (2002), Make Believe (2004), Somewhere Towards The End (2008), Alive, Alive Oh! (2015) and A Florence Diary (2017).

She once told Desert Island Discs she was “constantly falling in love, from the age of four, I think! With the garden boy, who had very beautiful brown eyes and he was pumping the hand pump under the lavatory window and he didn’t look up and I wanted to meet his eyes so I spat on his head.

“He looked up and our eyes met and I rushed out of the lavatory, scarlet in the face, with excitement.”

PA. Diana Athill worked into her 90s.