Victoria Glendinning

Victoria Glendinning, CBE (born 23 April 1937), is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist; she is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was appointed a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.

She was born in Sheffieldto a Quaker family. Her father was the banker Frederic Seebohm (created a life peer as Baron Seebohm in April 1972), while her great-grandfather was the economic historian, also called Frederic Seebohm. Her sister is Caroline Seebohm, the American biographer. Glendinning grew up near York and after attending Millfield School in Somerset, went up to 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 in 1996 she married Kevin O'Sullivan (a previous husband of Shirley Conran). 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. Another son Hugo Glendinning is a photographer and artist.