Liza Campbell is an artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

, calligrapher, columnist

Columnist

A columnist is a journalist who writes for publication in a series, creating an article that usually offers commentary and opinions. Columns appear in newspapers, magazines and other publications, including blogs....

 and writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

, born in the north of Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 and currently living in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. She is the second daughter of Hugh Campbell, 6th Earl Cawdor (1932–1993) by his first wife, the former Cathryn Hinde. She may be the last child of an Earl Cawdor to have been born at Cawdor Castle

Cawdor Castle

Cawdor Castle is a tower house set amid gardens in the parish of Cawdor, approximately 10 miles east of Inverness and 5 miles southwest of Nairn in Scotland, United Kingdom. It belonged to the Clan Calder. It still serves as home to the Dowager Countess Cawdor, stepmother of Colin Robert Vaughan...

, erroneously associated with Shakespeare's

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

 Macbeth

Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...

. (Her older sister Lady Emma Campbell was also born there, but her brothers and younger sister were born elsewhere, as were the children of the present Earl.)

Campbell was raised in Cawdor Castle during the Sixties, and studied art at Chelsea. She lived in Mauritius, Kenya (Nairobi) and in Indonesia for some years between 1990 and 1996.

Career

As an artist, Liza Campbell worked in an art gallery, and has had exhibitions of engraved soapstone

Soapstone

Soapstone is a metamorphic rock, a talc-schist. It is largely composed of the mineral talc and is thus rich in magnesium. It is produced by dynamothermal metamorphism and metasomatism, which occurs in the areas where tectonic plates are subducted, changing rocks by heat and pressure, with influx...

 at All Saints Gallery, Babbington House and the Sladmore Gallery. More recently, she has shown collages at the Michael Naimski Gallery.

For four years, from 2000, she wrote a back page column 'Adventures of a Past It Girl' for Harpers & Queen. Her first book, a memoir, called Title Deeds, was published in June 2006 by Doubleday and is now long-listed for the JR Ackerley award for literary biography.

Family

Campbell was the second of five children, and the second daughter of three daughters. Her parents divorced in 1979 after 22 years of marriage.

In 1990, she married William Robert Charles "Willie" Athill, a big-game fisherman, with whom she lived on a desert island for two years. By that marriage, she has two children, a daughter Storm (b. 1990) and a son Atticus (b. 1992), who are now in their teens. She is now divorced from Athill, the marriage having broken down in 1993.

External links

• The Peerage: Lady Elizabeth Campbell (Liza Campbell). Retrieved 13 August 2007.
• Liza Campbell official site. Last accessed 13 August 2007.
• Liza Campbell. "My week: Liza Campbell" article, published 13 August 2006]] in The Observer briefly mentions her relationship with her father and his second wife. Retrieved 13 August 2007.
• Nigel Farndale "My nightmares in Macbeth's castle" in The Daily Telegraph published 3 March 2006. Retrieved 13 August 2007.
• Liza Campbell. " I'm not just a chromosomal faux pas" in The Daily Telegraph published 19 January 2004. Retrieved 13 August 2007.
• Martin Hodgson and Stephen Khan. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article624649.ece published in The Independent on 4 June 2006. Retrieved 13 August 2007.