LONDON (AP) — Diana Athill, a writer and editor who honed the work of novelists including John Updike and Margaret Atwood before finding late-life fame as a memoirist, has died. She was 101.

Publisher Granta Books said Thursday that Athill died after a short illness.

Athill began her career soon after World War II at the Andre Deutsch imprint, and worked with writers including Updike, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul.

She published a memoir, "Instead of a Letter," in 1963, and went on to produce several more, recounting a long and eventful life as a woman in a male-dominated literary world. "Stet: An Editor's Life," published in 2000, was among the best known.

Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing said Athill's writing "was somehow exactly like herself: formidable, truthful, often amusing."