Lady Colin Campbell Books in Order

If you want to start with Princess Diana: Diana in Private → The Real Diana
If you want a broader view of the Windsors: The Royal Marriages → The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother → The Queen's Marriage
If you're interested in race and modern royals: People of Colour and the Royals → Meghan and Harry
If you like personal memoir and family drama: A Life Worth Living → Daughter of Narcissus
If you want her fiction first: Empress Bianca

Lady Colin Campbell is a British Jamaican writer, socialite and television personality whose sharp, sometimes controversial royal biographies have made her a familiar name to readers who follow the House of Windsor.

She was born Georgia Arianna Ziadie on 17 August 1949 in St Andrew, Jamaica, into the well known Ziadie family, whose Lebanese ancestry and department store business placed them in the island's business and social elite. From birth she lived with a serious congenital condition. Following medical opinion at the time, she was registered and brought up as male, a decision that clashed with her own sense of herself and shaped much of her early life.

As a teenager she pushed back against that assignment but for years could not access the surgery she needed. She eventually left Jamaica for New York City, studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and began working as a model and designer while living as the woman she knew herself to be. In 1970, helped by her grandmother, she finally had corrective surgery and formalised her legal identity, taking the name Georgia Arianna and receiving documents that matched her reality.

In the mid 1970s she married Lord Colin Ivar Campbell, younger son of the 11th Duke of Argyll, after a whirlwind courtship. The marriage brought her straight into the orbit of the British aristocracy but was brief and painful, ending amid allegations of violence, bitterness over her medical history and a very public divorce. During and after the split she successfully fought several tabloid stories that described her as a man who had undergone a sex change, arguing in court that they had misrepresented both her body and her past.

After the divorce she remained in Britain and built a life in London society as a hostess, charity fundraiser and fixer who understood both Jamaican and British upper class worlds. Writing had always appealed to her, and by the early 1980s she was scripting light-hearted radio pantomimes and then working on etiquette and social guides such as Lady Colin Campbell's Guide to Being a Modern Lady.

Her career changed gear in 1992 with Diana in Private, an unauthorised biography of Diana, Princess of Wales. Drawing on friends and contacts close to the princess, Campbell wrote about eating disorders, affairs and the emotional strain behind the marriage, long before many of those details were confirmed elsewhere. The book reached the New York Times bestseller list and established her as a royal commentator with an eye for uncomfortable detail.

She followed it with The Royal Marriages and later The Real Diana, then shifted focus to older generations in The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother and The Queen's Marriage. More recent books, including People of Colour and the Royals and Meghan and Harry, tackle race, empire and the Sussexes' break with royal life. Her work often blends documented fact with insider testimony, which some readers value for its frankness and others regard more cautiously.

Alongside the royal books she has turned the same scrutiny on her own life. Her autobiography A Life Worth Living recounts her childhood in Jamaica, years in New York, short marriage and later work as a socialite and charity organiser, while Daughter of Narcissus examines her complicated relationship with her mother and a wider family scarred by narcissistic behaviour. She has also written a novel, Empress Bianca, a dark story about an ambitious social climber in international high society.

Campbell adopted two Russian-born sons in the early 1990s and later moved to Castle Goring in West Sussex, a historic house she has spent years restoring. She divides her time between the castle and London, continuing to write and to appear on television and online. Her books offer detailed anecdotes, strong opinions and a perspective shaped by a lifetime spent close to, but never fully part of, the royal circle.