Decca Aitkenhead

Biography

Aitkenhead was born in Wiltshire with three elder brothers. Her father was a teacher in Bristol before becoming a builder after the family moved to the country. She was nine when her mother died. A home-maker who had helped run a playgroup, she was terminally ill with cancer. It was many years before Aitkenhead became aware that her mother had committed suicide.

She studied Politics and Modern History at Manchester University, where Aitkenhead was active in the Labour Club, and simultaneously worked for the Manchester Evening News as a columnist and feature writer. After moving to London, she completed a Diploma in Newspaper Journalism at the City University in 1995 before beginning her career in the national press.

Aitkenhead wrote for The Independent from 1995 before joining The Guardian in 1997, but left the paper in 1999 to write her book. During this period she lived in Jamaica for a year with her then husband, a photographer, and visited other parts of the world with him.

Her book The Promised Land: Travels in search of the perfect E, appeared in early 2002. While the drug ecstasy was promoted as a way to make oneself happy in her travelogue, the book was described by Dave Haslam in a London Review of Books article as, "In many ways" not "a great advertisement for drug-taking". Ian Penman in his Guardian review thought the work "tentative" while Geraldine Bedell in The Observer described it as an "intelligent and absorbing book". During a period as a freelance, she wrote for the Mail on Sunday, London Evening Standard, and The Sunday Telegraph, before rejoining The Guardian in 2004.

Aitkenhead contributed interviews for the newspaper's G2 section. In 2009 she won the Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards. She had "particularly impressed the judges with her remarkable encounter in August with Chancellor Alistair Darling". She is also a contributor to radio and television programmes.

In May 2014 her partner, charity worker Tony Wilkinson, drowned in Jamaica while attempting to rescue one of the couple's two sons. The couple had been together for a decade. Aitkenhead has written about their relationship, and the process of mourning in her memoir All at Sea (2016). Just over a year after Wilkinson died, Aitkenhead discovered she was suffering from an aggressive form breast cancer with a genetic link. After medical treatment, including chemotherapy, her cancer is in remission.