Daisy Louisa Dominica Waugh (born 19 February 1967), known as Daisy Waugh, is an English journalist, travel writer, novelist and television presenter. She has also worked as a restaurant critic and as an agony aunt for The Independent. On television, she has presented Channel 4's Travelogue show and is also a contributor to BBC Radio 4.
A member of a literary dynasty, Waugh is the second daughter of the writer and journalist Auberon Waugh, by his marriage in 1961 to the novelist and translator Lady Teresa Onslow, daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow. Her elder sister is Margaret Sophia Laura (born 1962), while her brothers are Alexander Evelyn Michael (born 1963, a writer on music) and Nathaniel Thomas Biafra (born 1968). They are grandchildren of the author Evelyn Waugh and great-grandchildren of the publisher and literary critic Arthur Waugh, and the four are reported to have remained close.
Through her great-grandfather Aubrey Herbert, a British diplomat who was twice offered the throne of Albania, Waugh is descended from the Earls of Carnarvon and William the Conqueror.
Waugh grew up from the age of four at Combe Florey House, in Somerset, of which she has written: "It's an impressive-looking place: big and quite grand and pleasingly symmetrical, set at the top of a long, winding drive, with an Elizabethan gatehouse at the bottom and a small lake with a private island halfway up... With forbidden attics and vast cellars chock-a-block with hidden treasures, there was never any need for a nursery... My memories are of a house, underheated (to put it mildly), but always full of noisy cousins and glamorous, clever people, eating well and talking quickly."
Instead of going to a university, Waugh took a job in a residential home for old people near Fulham Broadway.
At the age of twenty-one, she published her first book, a novel, What is the Matter with Mary Jane? (1988). She pursued an ambition to become a Hollywood screenwriter, which turned into a weekly newspaper column from Los Angeles. Other journalism includes working as a restaurant critic and as an agony aunt for The Independent, and travel writing.
On television, she has presented Channel 4's Travelogue show and is a contributor to the Radio Four programme Afternoon Shift.
A Small Town in Africa (1994), a book about Waugh's experiences while living for six months at Isiolo in the Eastern Province of Kenya, was well received. In 1995, she spent three months travelling in the United States with Samantha Weinberg.
In 2005, the Literary Review said of Waugh's new novel Bed of Roses "Cold Comfort Farm meets Goodbye, Mr Chips."
From about 2005 to 2007, Waugh lived in the country and wrote an anonymous column for The Sunday Times called Country/City Mole in Home. This phase came to an end when she gave up the rural idyll and returned to London to write The Desperate Diary of a Country Housewife (2008).
Waugh has now published several novels, as well as works of non-fiction, and continues to write regularly for national newspapers in the UK, including the Daily Telegraph, The Times, and The Sunday Times.
Waugh married Peter de Sales la Terrière in 1995. Their first child, Panda Sarah, was born on 22 September 1997, and a son called Zebedee three years later. She now lives at White City, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, with her husband and two children.
