Allegra Huston

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Allegra Huston (born 26 August 1964) is a writer, author, and editor based in Taos, New Mexico. She is the author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, the novel A Stolen Summer (Say My Name in hardback), and How to Edit and Be Edited, and the co-author, with James Navé, of How to Read for an Audience (both in the series Twice 5 Miles Guides: The Stuff Nobody Teaches You). She is the author of many screenplays, including the prize-winning short film Good Luck, Mr Gorski,^[1] which she also produced.

Life[]

Huston was born in London, England. Her mother was Italian-American ballerina Enrica Soma, and her biological father was The 2nd Viscount Norwich (better known as John Julius Norwich), the historian.^[2] When Huston was four, her mother died in a car accident and she subsequently moved to Ireland where she was brought up by film director John Huston (1906–87), her mother's estranged husband (Soma was his fourth wife).^[2] Allegra Huston's half-siblings include actress and director Anjelica Huston and writer Tony Huston (maternal half-siblings), actor and director Danny Huston (step-brother; his father, her then-step-father, fathered him with Zoe Sallis while married to Allegra's mother), writer Artemis Cooper and architect The 3rd Viscount Norwich (also known as Jason Cooper) (paternal half-siblings).

After gaining a First Class degree in English Language and Literature from Hertford College, Oxford, Huston worked in book publishing in London, first at Chatto & Windus and then at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where she was Editorial Director from 1990 to 1994. After two years as Acquisition and Development Consultant at Pathe Films, London, she left to write and edit freelance. Her articles have appeared in The Times, The Tatler, The Independent on Sunday, Mail on Sunday YOU magazine, Harper's Bazaar UK, Condé Nast Traveler, US and Paris Vogue, Newsweek, Mothering, People, and The Santa Fean. For seven years she was on the editorial staff of the biannual art and culture magazine .

Huston is the co-founder, with , of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops. They have taught multiday workshops in many places around the world. From 2007-2011 the program was offered as part of the curriculum for screenwriters at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway. (Will Collins, writer of Song of the Sea and My Brothers, is a graduate of the workshop.) She has also taught at the University of Oklahoma and the UK's prestigious Arvon Foundation.

Critical reception[]

Love Child has been praised by Simon Schama as "so bravely written, so clear and intensely vivid, so unsentimentally honest, so deeply humane," and by Salman Rushdie as "an extraordinary telling of an amazing life." In The Telegraph, Lynn Barber wrote that "Huston is an absolutely outstanding writer, incapable of writing a dull sentence."^[3]

Personal[]

Huston is the mother of one son, Rafael.^[4]

Selected books[]

• Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, published in April 2009 by Simon & Schuster (US) and Bloomsbury (UK).^[5][6][7]
• Say My Name: A Novel (London: HQ, July 2017; New York: MIRA, January 2018), republished in paperback as A STOLEN SUMMER (2019)
• Twice 5 Miles Guides: How to Edit and Be Edited and How to Read for an Audience (with James Navé)^[8]

References[]

External links[]

• Official website