Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her lifetime and 13 novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her famous friend and lover, Virginia Woolf.