Triumph and tragedy, happiness and despair, joy and sorrow - through love and death and life lived to the full with a man who loved both alcohol and other women - for food-writer Elisabeth Luard, marriage to writer and sometime king of satire Nicholas Luard was never going to be easy. 'If a man can be judged by the company he keeps, so can a wife. It includes: Private Eye; Beyond the Fringe; Peter Cook; Lenny Bruce; Ken Tynan; Christine Keeler; Jack Profumo; The Rolling Stones; The Clermont Club; Johnny Lucan; and Jimmy Goldsmith...Nicholas, the man to whom I was married for forty years, was always ahead of the game. I started real life as a wife - but that's not how it ends.'In 1962 and just turned twenty-one, Elizabeth married Nicholas Luard, novelist, travel-writer and co-founder of Private Eye. Within six years, she had had four children and had moved to a remote valley in southern Spain - an adventure featured in her first autobiography, "Family Life". "My Life"...continues the story, telling of a forty-year marriage and the people and places which brought both sunshine and shadow.From her childhood in South America to the private gaming tables of Monte Carlo to a rebellious year as a debutante to bringing up a family in the wilds of Andalusia to a prizewinning career as a cookery-writer to the death of a beloved daughter from Aids to the grim days of her husband's liver-transplant through to the final reckoning - when a man who attracted success as easily as disaster refused to accept the consequences of what couldn't be changed.
Yet this is a story of laughter and hope as well sadness - the healing power of children, the comfort of the kitchen table, the simple joy of making life work. "Family Life - Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing" was only the start of the story - this is the rest.
Author Biography:
Elisabeth Luard, author and illustrator, has won many awards for what her peers described, when awarding her the coveted Glenfiddich Trophy for 2007, as 'her seemingly effortless style of writing, self-drawn illustrations and understanding of the way in which ordinary people's cooking reflects their history, culture and everyday life - making her one of the most individual and distinctive food writers of all time.'In 1963 and just turned twenty-one, she married Nicholas Luard, novelist, travel-writer and co-founder of Private Eye. Within six years, she had had four children and had moved to a remote valley in southern Spain, where she worked as a natural history artist for the Tryon Gallery and Kew. Twelve years later, she turned to full-time writing. She is the author of a number of successful cookery books, including European Peasant Cookery (Grub Street, reprint 2005). Her first autobiography-with-recipes, Family Life - Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing, was The Guild of Food Writers' Book of the Year in 1996, and Sacred Food: Cooking for Spiritual Nourishment won the International Gourmet Award for best historical food-book in 2003.Elisabeth currently has a cookery series running until January 2009 in Country Living and a monthly ingredients-column in Waitrose Food Illustrated. She also contributes a monthly column to Richard Ingrams' The Oldie, and next year expects to contribute monthly food pages to Country Living. She is a regular contributor to various national newspapers and magazines including The Independent and The Scotsman, to which she contributed a cookery column for 10 years. She contributed the food pages to The Telegraph in 1997-8 and was the cookery correspondent of The Field through the 1980s.Other books include The Flavours of Andalucia (Glenfiddich winner, 1992), The Latin American Kitchen (Kyle Cathie 2002), The Food of Spain and Portugal (Kyle Cathie 2004, Gourmet Food), Food Adentures (Kyle Cathie, 2006), Truffles (Frances Lincoln 2006, Gourmet Award winner). Other work includes illustrations for the biologist Dr Miriam Rothschild.An experienced broadcaster, Elisabeth contributes regularly to The Food Programme and Woman's Hour. TV experience includes regular appearances on UK Good Food and a 13-part tv series, The Rich Tradition, made for SBS Australia shown on BBC2 in the early 1990's. She now lives in far west Wales where she is responsible for a hundred acres of regenerated native woodland and this year served on Transition Town Lampeter's steering committee for local sustainability after climate change.
