Decca Aitkenhead

Aitkenhead's family lived in Wiltshire when she was born; she has three older brothers. Her father was a teacher in Bristol before becoming a builder after the family moved to the country.[1] Her mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and died when Aitkenhead was nine. Many years later, Aitkenhead discovered that her mother had committed suicide.[1]

Aitkenhead studied Politics and Modern History at the University of Manchester, where she worked for the Manchester Evening News as a columnist and feature writer.[2] After moving to London, she completed a Diploma in Newspaper Journalism at City University in 1995[3] before beginning her career in the national press.

She wrote for The Independent from 1995 before joining The Guardian in 1997, but left the paper in 1999 to write her first book.[2] During this period she lived in Jamaica for a year with her then husband.[4]

Her book The Promised Land: Travels in search of the perfect E, appeared in early 2002. While the drug ecstasy was promoted as a way to make oneself happy in her travelogue, the book was described by Dave Haslam in a London Review of Books article as, "In many ways" not "a great advertisement for drug-taking" as her experiences are largely "joyless" and not transformative.[5] Ian Penman in his Guardian review[6] thought the work "tentative" while Geraldine Bedell in The Observer described it as an "intelligent and absorbing book".[7] During a period as a freelance, she wrote for the Mail on Sunday, London Evening Standard, and The Sunday Telegraph, before rejoining The Guardian in 2004.[2]

Aitkenhead contributed interviews for the newspaper's G2 section. In 2009 she won the Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards. She had "particularly impressed the judges with her remarkable encounter in August with Chancellor Alistair Darling".[8][9] She is also a contributor to radio and television programmes.

In May 2014, her partner, charity worker Tony Wilkinson, drowned in Jamaica while attempting to rescue one of the couple's two sons.[10] The couple had been together for a decade. Aitkenhead has written about their relationship, and the process of mourning in her memoir All at Sea (2016).[11] Just over a year after Wilkinson died, Aitkenhead discovered she was suffering from an aggressive form of breast cancer with a genetic link. After medical treatment, including chemotherapy, her cancer is in remission.[11][12][13]

She was the winner of the BBC's 2020 Russell Prize for best writing for her article How a Jamaican Psychedelic Mushroom Retreat Helped Me Process My Grief, published in The Times.[14]

Aitkenhead caused controversy in January 2021 when she wrote a profile about Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson in The Sunday Times, tied to his upcoming book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. It was Peterson's first media appearance since he had emerged from benzodiazepine dependence in mid-2020.[15] Peterson wrote a response to the Sunday Times profile on his website, saying that he was "stunned by the degree of sheer cruelty and spite" in the profile.[16] Peterson criticized the profile for stating that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia without noting that this was a misdiagnosis.[17] He also criticized Aitkenhead for prefacing a description of his daughter Mikhaila's lifelong health issues with "According to her website", implying that she may have been lying about it.[18][19] In response to the article, Peterson published the unedited audio of Aitkenhead's interview on YouTube that contrasts with many of the assertions Aitkenhead made in the article and included notable omissions, such as that the doctor that suggested Peterson may be schizophrenic didn't formerly make the diagnosis, and was recommending Electroconvulsive therapy, a controversial treatment, and that his treatments in Russia and Serbia had been effective in treating the akathisia, directly in opposition to the suggestion of article's title.[20] As a result, Peterson cancelled his other planned media interviews related to the book.[16] Aitkenhead's profile received negative coverage from media outlets.[21][22][23]

• Decca Aitkenhead, The Promised Land: Travels in search of the perfect E, London: Fourth Estate, 2002, ISBN 978-1841153377
• Decca Aitkenhead, All at Sea, London: Fourth Estate, April 2016, ISBN 978-0008142148

• Decca Aitkenhead's Guardian contributor page
• Decca Aitkenhead at Journalisted