Ghosting : a Double Life / Jennie Erdal. - Edinburgh ; New York ; Melbourne : Canongate,
2005
The Guardian, 2022-04-23
Information trouvée : Novelist and author of Ghosting, a memoir about her childhood in Fife and her work
as the ghostwriter for the publisher Naim Attallah. Jennie Erdal’s first novel was
in fact her third – by the time the Scottish writer and translator published The Missing
Shade of Blue in 2012, she had already written two erotic novels, as well as numerous
newspaper columns, all published under the name of her former employer, the flamboyant
entrepreneur Naim Attallah. She was born Jennifer Elizabeth Wilkie Crawford in Lochgelly.
She went on to the University of St Andrews, where she took a double first in Russian
and philosophy and was awarded the Miller prize for the most distinguished final year
student. She married in her early 20s and undertook her first major translation –
the memoirs of the artist Leonid Pasternak, father of the poet and novelist Boris
– when her three children were under five. . In 1994, she married David Erdal, who
worked in economic democracy, assisting employee buyouts of companies. Erdal also
taught creative writing at the University of Dundee and worked as a tutor at Moniack
Mhor writers’ centre. Jennie Erdal, writer and translator, born 2 February 1951; died
23 May 2020