Nigella Lucy Lawson was born on 6 January 1960, she is an English food writer, TV cook and cooking show host. She is the daughter of Nigel Lawson, a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Vanessa (née Salmon) Lawson, whose family owned the J. Lyons and Co. food and catering business. She attended Godolphin and Latymer School, London. After graduating from the University of Oxford, where she was a member of Lady Margaret Hall, Lawson started work as a book reviewer and restaurant critic, later becoming the deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times in 1986. She then embarked upon a career as a freelance journalist, writing for several newspapers and magazines. In 1998 her first cookery book, How to Eat, was published and sold 300,000 copies, becoming a best-seller. She published her second book in 2000, How to Be a Domestic Goddess, which won her the British Book Award for Author of the Year. In 1999 she hosted her own cooking show series, Nigella Bites, on Channel 4, accompanied by another best-selling cookbook. Nigella Bites won Lawson a Guild of Food Writers Award; her 2005 ITV daytime chat show Nigella met with a negative critical reaction and was cancelled after attracting low ratings. She hosted the Food Network's Nigella Feasts in the United States in 2006, followed by a three-part BBC Two series, Nigella's Christmas Kitchen, in the UK, which led to the commissioning of Nigella Express on BBC Two in 2007. Her own cookware range, Living Kitchen, has a value of £7 million, and she has sold more than 3 million cookery books worldwide to date. Nigella Lawson was born in Wandsworth, London, one of the daughters of Nigel Lawson, a future Conservative MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher's government, and his first wife Vanessa Salmon (1936–1985), a celebrated beauty and the heiress to the J. Lyons and Co. fortune. Both her parents were from Jewish families. Her given name was originally suggested by her grandmother. Her family kept homes in Kensington and Chelsea. Nigel and Vanessa Lawson divorced in 1980, when Nigella was 20. They both remarried: her father that year to a House of Commons researcher, Therese Maclear (to whom he was married until 2008), and her mother, in the early 1980s, to philosopher A. J. Ayer (they remained married until her mother's death). As her father was at the time a prominent political figure, Nigella found some of the judgements and preconceptions that were formed about her frustrating. She has attributed her unhappiness as a child, in part, to the problematic relationship she had with her mother. Lawson's mother died of liver cancer in Westminster, London at the age of 48. Lawson's full-blood siblings are her brother, Dominic, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, sister Horatia, and sister Thomasina, who died of breast cancer, in her early thirties, in 1993; She has a half-brother, Tom, who is currently headmaster at Eastbourne College, and a half-sister, Emily; Tom and Emily are her father's children by his second wife. Lawson is a cousin to both George Monbiot and Fiona Shackleton through the Salmon family.

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