Former Vanity Fair editor's diaries to W&N

Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of Condé Nast magazine Vanity Fair, is publishing her diaries from eight years in the job with Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 will be published by in hardback and e-book on 14th November 2017 as "a unique and riveting work of social history", providing a candid record of working at Vanity Fair during the "excessive" ’80s in New York and Hollywood.

Alan Samson, publisher non fiction at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, bought world English language rights, excluding USA and Canada, from Charlie Brotherstone at Ed Victor Limited.

“I picked up the diaries for the first time in ages because I was thinking of writing a book about the era,” said Brown. “To my astonishment, I found I’d already written one. I rediscovered how madcap those days were – how chancy, how new, how supercharged.”

Alan Samson, publisher for non-fiction at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, commented: “As a chronicle of Manhattan in the 1980s Tina Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries will be hard to surpass. Candid, insightful and funny, her wonderfully entertaining book reminded me of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, because she is both enjoying the party and shrewdly observing it at the same time.

"Weidenfeld & Nicolson is thrilled to welcome Tina to our pantheon of great diarists that already includes Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward, Chips Channon, Cecil Beaton, Roy Strong, Alan Clark and Michael Palin. There will surely not be a more readably enduring book published this year.”

The acquisition follows publication of a year in the life of former editor-in-chief of British Vogue Alexandra Shulman with Penguin in 2016. Shulman, who edited British Vogue for 25 years, is its longest serving editor.

Brown will be in conversation with Catherine Ostler about her work at the Cliveden Literary Festival this October.