For over quarter of a century Anna Vaux has been an editor at the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), the world’s most respected intellectual forum. When not safeguarding the literary culture of the country she moonlights as a ghostwriter for several major publishing houses including Penguin.
Fed by a life-long passion for the self-help manual and inspirational memoir (several of which she has ghostwritten herself), her journalism is notable for its focus on the misguided, the murderous, the mad and merely unsung.
She has been published in numerous papers and magazines, including the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Times and Evening Standard and in French for the prestigious Parisian magazine Books.
As a specialist in 20th century and contemporary literature Vaux has written and broadcast on a veritable pantheon of literary ladies from Iris Murdoch and Hilary Mantel to Zelda Fitzgerald and Peggy Guggenheim. She has also served as the personal editor to many international best sellers and world class intellectuals and worked closely with every sort of ‘winner’ from the Nobel and Pulitzer to Orange and Booker prizes, including George Steiner, Christopher Hitchens, Mary Beard and William Dalrymple.
Time well spent on the celebrated Obituaries Desk of the Daily Telegraph under the tutelage of the legendary Hugh Massingberd – inventor of the modern obit – taught Vaux the importance of the ordinary life and art of understatement. Her subjects have usually been dead. But not exclusively.