Allegra Huston

Allegra Huston (born 26 August 1964) is a writer and editor based in Taos, New Mexico. She is the author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found, published in April 2009 by Simon & Schuster (US) and Bloomsbury (UK). Her first novel, Say My Name, will be published in August 2017 by HQ in the UK and in January 2018 by MIRA in the US.
Love Child was praised by Simon Schama (author of Citizens and Landscape and Memory) 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. I loved it." In The Telegraph, Lynn Barber wrote that "Huston is an absolutely outstanding writer, incapable of writing a dull sentence."
Huston is also the writer and producer of the award-winning short film Good Luck, Mr. Gorski and the author of a number of screenplays currently in development.
Huston was born in London, England. Her mother was Italian-American ballerina Enrica Soma, and her biological father is John Julius Norwich (Viscount Norwich). When Huston was four, her mother died in a car accident and she subsequently moved to Ireland where she was brought up by film director John Huston (1906–87), her mother's estranged husband (Soma was his fourth wife). Allegra Huston's siblings include actress and director Anjelica Huston, writer Walter Anthony "Tony" Huston, actor and director Danny Huston, writer Artemis Cooper and architect Jason Cooper.
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. (Will Collins, writer of Song of the Sea and My Brothers, is a graduate of the workshop.) She has also taught at the University of Oklahoma and in March 2017 will be offering a workshop in creative nonfiction at the Taos Writers' Conference.
She is the mother of one son, Rafael.