Judith Mackrell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Judith Mackrell is an English non-fiction writer.
Mackrell graduated from the University of York and the University of Oxford. She was a part-time lecturer at Oxford, Oxford Polytechnic and the University of Roehampton.[1]
Writing
Mackrell was The Guardian's dance critic for 23 years up to 2019, when a writer in Dance Magazine said "There was always something to learn from Mackrell’s clear-eyed elegance".[2]
She co-authored Darcey Bussell's 1998 Life in Dance.
In 2000, she co-authored with Debra Craine the Oxford Dictionary of Dance; the two authors produced a second edition of the work in 2010.[3]
Bloomsbury Ballerina, her 2008 biography of Lydia Lopokova, the wife of economist John Maynard Keynes, was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Book Award for Biography.[4]
Her 2013 Flappers considered the lives of six women of the Jazz Age: Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, Tamara de Lempicka and Zelda Fitzgerald.[5] In contrast, her 2021 Going with the Boys, published in the United States as The Correspondents, covered five women war correspondents and a war photographer who worked during the Second World War: Virginia Cowles, Clare Hollingworth, Sigrid Schultz, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, and Helen Kirkpatrick.[6][7]
Her 2017 The Unfinished Palazzo tells the story of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, and of three women involved in it in the early 20th century: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim; the palazzo now houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, her 2026 joint biography of sibling artists Gwen John and Augustus John, was shortlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.[8]
