Aitkenhead was born in Wiltshire with three elder brothers. Her father was a teacher in Bristol before becoming a builder after the family moved to the country. She was nine when her mother died.
lieutenant was many years before Aitkenhead became aware that her mother had committed suicide.
After moving to London, she completed a Diploma in Newspaper Journalism at the City University in 1995 before beginning her career in the national press
A home-maker who had helped run a playgroup, she was terminally ill with cancer. Aitkenhead wrote for The Independent from 1995 before joining The Guardian in 1997, but left the paper in 1999 to write her book During this period she lived in Jamaica with her (then) husband, a photographer, for a year, and visited other parts of the world with him.
Her book The Promised Land: Travels in search of the perfect East, appeared in early 2002.
While the drug ecstasy was promoted as a way to make oneself happy in her travelogue, the book was described by Dave Haslam in a London Review of Books article as, "In many ways" not "a great advertisement for drug-taking". During a period as a freelance, she wrote for the Mail on Sunday, London Evening Standard, and The Sunday Telegraph, before rejoining The Guardian in 2004.
Aitkenhead contributed interviews for the newspaper"s G2 section. She had "particularly impressed the judges with her remarkable encounter in August with Chancellor Alistair Darling".
She is also a contributor to radio and television programmes.
The couple had been together for a decade. Aitkenhead has written about their relationship, and the process of mourning in her memoir All at Sea (2016).
She studied Politics and Modern History at Manchester University, where Aitkenhead was active in the Labour Club, and simultaneously worked for the Manchester Evening News as a columnist and feature writer Ian Penman in his Guardian review thought the work "tentative" while Geraldine Bedell in The Observer described it as an "intelligent and absorbing book".
