Allegra Huston is a writer, author, and editor based in Taos, New Mexico. She is the author of Love Child, Say My Name: A Novel, and other books and screenplays. She also wrote the writer and producer of the award-winning short film Good Luck, Mr Gorski.
Life
Huston was born in London, England. Her mother was Italian-American ballerina Enrica Soma, and her biological father was The 2nd Viscount Norwich, the historian. When Huston was four, her mother died in a car accident and she subsequently moved to Ireland where she was brought up by film directorJohn Huston, her mother's estranged husband. Allegra Huston's half-siblings include actress and director Anjelica Huston, writer Tony Huston, actor and director Danny Huston, writer Artemis Cooper and architect The 3rd Viscount Norwich. After gaining a First Class degree in English Language and Literature from Hertford College, Oxford, Huston worked in book publishing in London, first at Chatto & Windus and then at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where she was Editorial Director from 1990 to 1994. After two years as Acquisition and Development Consultant at Pathe Films, London, she left to write and edit freelance. Her articles have appeared in The Times, The Tatler, The Independent on Sunday, Mail on Sunday YOU magazine, Harper's Bazaar UK, Condé Nast Traveler, US and Paris Vogue, Newsweek, Mothering, People, and The Santa Fean. She is on the editorial staff of the biannual art and culture magazine Garage and is the restaurant critic of The Taos Magazine. In collaboration with the poet James Navé, Huston conducts writing workshops called The Imaginative Storm, a multi-day program which they have taught in many places around the world. For five years, the program was offered as part of the curriculum for screenwriters at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has also taught at the University of Oklahoma and in March 2017 offered a workshop in creative nonfiction at the Taos Writers' Conference.
Critical reception
Love Child has been praised by Simon Schama as "so bravely written, so clear and intensely vivid, so unsentimentally honest, so deeply humane," and by Salman Rushdie as "an extraordinary telling of an amazing life." In The Telegraph, Lynn Barber wrote that "Huston is an absolutely outstanding writer, incapable of writing a dull sentence."
