Nigella Lawson — chef / tv with roots in the Russian Empire
Nigella Lucy Lawson was born in Wandsworth, London, on 6 January 1960, the daughter of the journalist and politician Nigel Lawson, later Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Vanessa Salmon, of the family behind J. Lyons & Co. Her connection to the Russian Empire runs through her father's family, not her mother's.
Her paternal great-grandfather, Gustav Leibson, was a merchant from Mitau, now Jelgava in Latvia, the capital of the Courland Governorate of the Russian Empire. He settled in Britain around 1890 and became a British subject in 1911, or in 1914 by another account; in 1925 the family changed its name to Lawson. His son Ralph Lawson (1904–1982) was the father of Nigel Lawson (1932–2023), who served as Chancellor from 1983 to 1989. Her mother's family, the Salmons and Glucksteins, traced their origins to the Netherlands and the Rhineland. Her brother is the journalist Dominic Lawson.
After reading medieval and modern languages at Oxford, she joined The Spectator in 1983 as a book reviewer and restaurant critic, and in 1986 became deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times. She then worked as a freelance journalist, writing among other things the food column for British Vogue.
Her first book, How to Eat (1998), became a bestseller. Its successor, How to Be a Domestic Goddess (2000), devoted largely to baking, won her the title of Author of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2001. Her first television series, Nigella Bites, ran on Channel 4 from 1999 to 2001 and won the Guild of Food Writers' television award; it was followed by further series in Britain and, from 2006, in the United States, among them Nigella Feasts, Nigella Express and Simply Nigella. Each was accompanied by a book, and her cookbooks have sold several million copies worldwide.
In 2001 she declined an OBE, as leaked government papers revealed two years later. She has been a judge on the cookery competition The Taste and on the Booker Prize. In January 2026 Channel 4 announced that she would succeed Prue Leith as a judge on The Great British Bake Off, alongside Paul Hollywood.
"Her father's grandfather, Gustav Leibson, a merchant from Mitau (Jelgava) in the Courland Governorate, settled in Britain around 1890, became a British subject in 1911 (some sources say 1914), and the family took the name Lawson in 1925."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Mitau (now Jelgava, Latvia), Courland Governorate — paternal great-grandfather Gustav Leibson
Her paternal great-grandfather, Gustav Leibson, was a merchant from Mitau, now Jelgava in Latvia, then in the Courland Governorate of the Russian Empire, who settled in Britain around 1890. His grandson was Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer, her father. Her mother's family came from the Netherlands and the Rhineland.
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Mitau (now Jelgava, Latvia), Courland Governorate — paternal great-grandfather Gustav Leibson. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.