Anne Chisholm
- Prizes judged
Anne Chisholm holds the distinction of being a distinguished biographer, a former Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and having a goat named after her by Jilly Cooper in her novel Jump.
The goat, according to Chisholm, although ‘sweet-natured, as white as a unicorn with long golden eyelashes and biddable - if very quick with her horns’, was revenge for a disobliging review Chisholm had written of a Cooper novel some 20 years earlier. Chisholm, whose first job was at Private Eye, rather enjoyed the absurdity. She is nevertheless better known as a prize-winning biographer of Nancy Cunard and the Bloomsbury doyenne Frances Partridge. The Cooper review notwithstanding, Chisholm is also an astute and generally benign critic.