Victoria Glendinning


Victoria Glendinning is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is an honorary vice-president of English PEN and vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature. She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Prize for biography.

Early life and education

She was born in Sheffield, England, to a Quaker family. Her father was the banker Frederic Seebohm, and her great-grandfather was the economic historian, also called Frederic Seebohm. Her mother was clever, "but she never did anything with it, except wait for my father to come home", Glendinning said in a 1999 interview.
Her sister is Caroline Seebohm, an American biographer.
Glendinning grew up near York and, after being privately educated at Millfield School in Somerset, went up to Somerville College, Oxford, to read Modern Languages.

Awards and honours

Glendinning is the only person to have won the Whitbread Prize for biography twice, for her works on Vita Sackville-West and Anthony Trollope. She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981 for her biography of Edith Sitwell. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982.
She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin in 1995 and by the University of York in 2000.

Marriages and children

In the second year of her degree course, in 1958, she married one of her Spanish lecturers, Nigel Glendinning. They divorced in 1981. Her second husband, Terence de Vere White, father of Dervla Murphy's only child, died of Parkinson's disease in 1994. In 1996, she married Kevin O'Sullivan, who had previously been married to Shirley Conran. She had four sons before she was 28: sportswriter Matthew Glendinning, with whom she coauthored the book Sons and Mothers; mathematician Paul Glendinning; philosopher Simon Glendinning; and photographer and artist Hugo Glendinning. She sent her children to the local state school.

Selected publications

Critical studies and reviews

  • Review of Raffles and the golden opportunity.