Rachel Johnson (born 1965) is an English editor, journalist and author based in London.
Johnson is the daughter of former Conservative MEP Stanley Johnson and artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl (née Fawcett), the daughter of Sir James Fawcett, a prominent barrister and president of the European Commission of Human Rights. She is the younger sister of Boris, the Mayor of London; older sister of Leo Johnson, the entrepreneur, film-maker and partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers [1] and Jo Johnson, the award-winning editor of the Lex Column on the Financial Times and MP for Orpington.
On her father's side Johnson is great-granddaughter of Ali Kemal Bey, a liberal Turkish journalist and the interior minister in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, who was murdered during the Turkish War of Independence. During World War I, her grandfather and great aunt were recognised as British subjects and took their grandmother's maiden name of Johnson.[2]
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She was educated at Winsford First School on Exmoor, Primrose Hill Primary in Camden, the European School in Brussels, the independent Ashdown House School in East Sussex, Bryanston School in Dorset and St Paul's Girls' School. In 1984 she went up to New College, Oxford to read Classics (Literae Humaniores). She edited Isis, the magazine for Oxford University students .
In 1989 she joined the staff of the Financial Times, becoming the first female graduate trainee at the paper, where she wrote on the economy. She moved to the BBC in 1994, but left to move to Washington DC as a columnist and freelancer in 1997. She has written weekly columns for the Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard and other regular columns for Easy Living magazine, She Magazine, and the Financial Times. She is a contributing editor of The Spectator and until 2009 was a weekly columnist on The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard and other publications. She regularly appears on radio and TV.
In 2009 Johnson became the ninth editor of The Lady, a weekly magazine established in 1885. Her first few months were the subject of a Channel 4 documentary called 'The Lady and the Revamp', nominated for a Grierson award. Since taking up the post in September 2009 she has redeveloped the brand, introducing well-known contributors (including Justin Webb and Sir Tim Rice) and regular contributors such as Mary Killen and Alexander Chancellor, as well as overseeing a redesign by Creative Director Stefano Arata, to better compete with the mainstream women’s magazines.[3]
Her works include the international bestseller Notting Hell (Penguin 2006), a novel about couples living in the Notting Hill area of London, Shire Hell (a follow up to Notting Hell), and The Mummy Diaries (Penguin 2004), a diary of her London-Exmoor year. She also commissioned and edited The Oxford Myth (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988) while still an undergraduate at Oxford. Her most recent book is A Diary of The Lady, My First Year as Editor (Penguin 2010) and a new novel, Winter Games is due for publication in late Autumn 2011.
Johnson's Shire Hell won the 2008 Bad Sex in Fiction Prize,[4] which she characterized as an "absolute honour".
Her short story "Severely Gifted" appeared in The Sunday Times on 21 December 2008. (online text)
She is married to Ivo Dawnay, the communications director of the National Trust, and lives in London and Somerset with her three children.
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