Background
She was born in Ardboe, County Tyrone, Ireland, then a remote area without telephones or electricity.
She was born in Ardboe, County Tyrone, Ireland, then a remote area without telephones or electricity.
When she moved back to England, she attended the National Film School for four years and directed a one-hour documentary The Daisy Chain.
She left for London after winning the Vogue magazine Talent competition, working there as Features Editor. She also wrote a column for the New Statesman and she had her own page in the Evening Standard a year later. She moved to Manhattan in 1967 becoming a features editor and writer for Diana Vreeland on American Vogue.
She reviewed theatre and film and interviewed Barbra Streisand, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, John Osborne, Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol among many others
She also wrote for The Observer, The Sunday Times, Vogue, and many other newspapers and magazines. She currently writes a column for The Big Issue and is Adjunct Professor at Barnard College Columbia University, New York teaching creative non-fiction.
She is also Northern Ireland panel member on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4 Round Britain Quiz
In 1967 Polly married Andy Garnett an industrialist, philanthropist and writer of books including Steel Wheels, A Social History of Railways and Lucky Dog, a memoir. Together they had three daughters Rose Garnett, Head of Development at Film 4, Daisy Garnett writer and journalist and Bay Garnett fashion stylist, author and editors
She has been a Booker Prize judge (1984), Irish Times Literary Award judge (1994), Pushkin Prize judge (1998) and was awarded the Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for Services to Literature in 1994. Her sister Marie is an editor and writer (Over Nine Waves, a collection of Irish myths and legends) who married the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney.
