Selina Hastings
- Prizes judged
Lady Selina Hastings, daughter of the 16th Earl of Huntingdon, is a biographer who has written highly-praised lives of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Rosamond Lehmann and Somerset Maugham.
Hastings has supplemented her career with journalism, initially on the books pages of the Daily Telegraph and then as literary editor of Harpers & Queen. She is also an experienced re-worker of tales - including the Bible - for children. Hastings has admitted that what initially drew her to literary biography was that her subjects belonged to an era that attracted her ‘partly because my parents, who lived to be quite old (my father was born in 1901), talked a lot about their lives, and I was always fascinated by that’. Equable herself, she also liked that the lives of her subjects ‘were fuelled by anger’.