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Artemis Cooper, Lady Beevor, is the author of Cairo in the War: 1939-1945 and Paris after the Liberation: 1944-1949, written with her husband Antony Beevor. In a conversation with Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, she will talk about her biographical work for food writer Elizabeth David, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, and the traveller and philhellene Patrick Leigh Fermor. With Colin Thubron, she edited The Broken Road, the final stretch of Leigh Fermor's journey on foot to Constantinople in 1933-4. She is currently working on the cultural history of Paris.
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Born in London in 1953, and educated at the French Lycee, the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Woldingham and Camden School for Girls in North London, Artemis Cooper first wanted to be a picture restorer but changed her mind and went to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she read English. She spent a year teaching English in Alexandria, Egypt and then lived in America for a while - mostly in New Mexico.
Artemis Cooper's first book was an edition of the letters from her grandparents called A Durable Fire which came out in 1983. By 1986, she was researching Cairo in the War 1939-1945 (1989), which is about the extraordinary society of spies and diplomats, writers and celebrities, soldiers and cypherenes who passed through the city while Europe was occupied and the Desert War was in progress. In 1991 came another edition of letters, Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper and while working on this book, her daughter Eleanor (then eight months old) went from perfect health to the brink of death in twenty-four hours. She told the story in Watching in the Dark: A Child’s Fight for Life (1992). Soon after giving birth, she was commissioned to write a book about post-war Paris and, with the help of her husband Antony, she wrote Paris After the Liberation: 1944-1949 in 1994.
Writing at the Kitchen Table: the authorized biography of Elizabeth David (1999) was her first biography. Then she was offered the job of writing the biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who stipulated that his biography was not published until after his death. By the time he died in June 2011, the book was almost finished, and Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure was published in October 2012. The following year, the travel writer Colin Thubron edited The Broken Road, the last and posthumous volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy about his walk across Europe in the early 1930s.
*There may be slight changes to the discussion points or the advertised start and end times of this webinar, subject to Artemis Cooper's work requirements.
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