Janet Coggin

Janet Coggin (3 April 1936 – 23 September 2010) was a British novelist and memoirist.

Janet Coggin
Born	(1936-04-03)3 April 1936 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England
Died	23 September 2010(2010-09-23) (aged 74) West Linton, Scotland
Occupation	Novelist Memoirist

Early life

Coggin was born in Cambridge in 1936 to Maurice Coggin and his wife Eleanora (née Illeris).^[1] Her mother was a member of the SOE during WWII.^[2] Her aunt, Joan Coggin, was a detective and children's novelist in the 1940s.^[3]

Coggin grew up in Totnes. Her parents divorced, and in 1949 her mother remarried, to Maj Franklin Lushington. In 1964 Col (as he was by then) Lushington was killed in a car accident; Eleanora Lushington died later the same year at their home in Spain.^[4] Brought up by her pacifist father, Coggin attended the progressive Dartington Hall School.

Dieter Gerhardt

In the late 1950s, Coggin met a South African naval officer, Dieter Gerhardt, at a wedding in Devon.^[5] In 1957 they were married.^[6] They had three children.^[5]

In 1966, after eight years of marriage, Gerhardt took her aside and informed her that he was a KGB spy and, indeed, had been one since before they had met.^[7] She immediately ended the marriage, and returned to Europe on the next available passage, with her three children.^[7] She then lived in Ireland for some years, terrified of being murdered by the KGB.^[7] She rented a flat in the Crosthwaite Park area in Dún Laoghaire, working in a variety of jobs to make ends meet.^[7] She subsequently taught English in Greece and, returning to Ireland, worked in the Camphill Community, a training college for children with learning difficulties in Naas.^[7][5]

In 1983 Gerhardt and his second wife were arrested, and subsequently imprisoned for treason.^[7]

Literary career

Her literary output consisted of four novels and two memoirs, most notably a lightly-fictionalised account of her marriage to a KGB spy, The Spy's Wife.

List of works

Novels

• The Leaving (1988: Robert Hale).^[8]
• The Bread Man (1989: Robert Hale).^[9]
• McElhinney (1989: Robert Hale).
• Northside (1990: Robert Hale).^[10]

Memoirs

• The Spy's Wife (1998: Constable).^[11]
• High Tide and the Heron Dived: A Totnes Childhood (2012: Folly Island Press).

Personal life

Her second husband was Costas Balis, who died in 2004. She died in West Linton, in Scotland, in 2010, aged 74.^[12]