Decca Aitkenhead Biography
Decca Aitkenhead is an English journalist, author, and broadcaster. He provided interviews for the newspaper’s G2 section.
How old is Decca Aitkenhead? – Age
He is 53 years old as of 1971 in Wiltshire, England. His real name is Jessica Aitkenhead.
Decca Aitkenhead Family – Education
Aitkenhead’s family lived in Wiltshire when she was born, and she has three older brothers. Her father was a teacher in Bristol before becoming a builder when the family relocated to the countryside. Her mother was diagnosed with fatal lung cancer and died when Aitkenhead was nine. Many years later, Aitkenhead learnt that her mother had committed suicide. Aitkenhead studied Politics and Modern History at the University of Manchester, and she worked as a columnist and feature writer for the Manchester Evening News. After relocating to London, she earned a Diploma in Newspaper Journalism from City, University of London in 1995 before starting her career in the national press.
Decca Aitkenhead Wife – Children
In May 2014, Aitkenhead’s partner, Kids Company charity worker Tony Wilkinson, drowned in Jamaica while attempting to save one of the couple’s two children. The pair had been together for a decade. Aitkenhead’s memoir All at Sea details their connection and the bereavement process.
Decca Aitkenhead Net Worth
He has an estimated net worth of £4 million.
Decca Aitkenhead Cancer
Just over a year after Wilkinson died, Aitkenhead realized she had an aggressive form of breast cancer with a hereditary link. Her cancer has gone into remission following medical treatment, which included chemotherapy.
Decca Aitkenhead Career
Aitkenhead began writing for The Independent in 1995 and then joined The Guardian in 1997, but she quit the newspaper in 1999 to write her first book. During this time, she spent a year in Jamaica with her then-husband.
Her book, The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E, was released in 2002. While ecstasy was touted as a way to make oneself happy in her travels, Dave Haslam in a London Review of Books article regarded the book as, “In many ways” not “a great advertisement for drug-taking” because her experiences are generally “joyless” and not transforming.
In his Guardian review, Ian Penman called the work “tentative,” while Geraldine Bedell in The Observer called it a “intelligent and absorbing book.” She worked as a freelance writer for the Mail on Sunday, the London Evening Standard, and the Sunday Telegraph until returning to The Guardian in 2004.
Aitkenhead provided interviews for the newspaper’s G2 section.She won the British Press Award for Interviewer of the Year in 2009.She was said to have “particularly impressed the judges with her remarkable encounter in August with Chancellor Alistair Darling” .She also contributes to radio and television shows.Aitkenhead won the BBC’s 2020 Russell Prize for Best Writing for her article, How a Jamaican Psychedelic Mushroom Retreat Helped Me Process My Grief, which appeared in The Times.