Biography

Alexander McCall Smith’s much loved character Precious Ramotswe first came to life on the pages of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency 25 years ago. Join us as we celebrate this global success. The author gives us insights into his writing career and a glimpse of the many series that have been published in the intervening years, including 44 Scotland Street series and a new novel in the Detective Varg series, The Discreet Charm of the Big Bad Wolf.

It’s all too easy to think of Agatha Christie as a very proper Edwardian lady of leisure, until you discover she loved fast cars and went surfing in Hawaii, as well as of course writing some of the most enduring and best-loved British murder mysteries. Historian and television presenter Lucy Worsley, joint chief curator at the Historic Royal Palaces, presents a new side of Christie in Agatha Christie – A Very Elusive Woman, her account of the writer’s life, based on personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen. Join Worsley to discover the writer who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman.

Aged 60, Mark Ellison has written his first book, How to Build Impossible Things, the result of 40 years as a carpenter – the best in New York, by some accounts. From building a staircase that the famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava called ‘a masterpiece’ to being profiled in the New Yorker, Ellison is a celebrity in his world. He has worked in the most beautiful homes you’ve never seen, specialising in rarefied, lavish projects for the most demanding of clients including the late David Bowie and Robin Williams. But as a native of the old steel town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his path was an unexpected one. Learn about his early life, his most challenging and fulfilling work, and perhaps pick up a tip or two for constructing your own bit of furniture.

Drawing on over a decade of archival research, Rebecca N Mitchell, professor of Victorian literature and culture at the University of Birmingham, shows that the effortless wit and writing of Wilde – often chided by detractors for being indolent and egotistical – was actually the product of studious and carefully concealed labour. Mitchell takes a look at the manuscript evidence which shows that he worked tirelessly at his craft, filling notebooks with drafts and carefully revising his bon mots.

When actor Richard E Grant’s wife Joan died in September 2021, after the couple had been together for almost 40 years, he was left with a challenge from her: find a pocketful of happiness each day. The result is the book A Pocketful of Happiness, set between the present day and the past, using diary entries that recall landmarks from Grant’s remarkable life and glittering career. This candid and profound event from one of Britain’s best-loved actors will make you laugh and move you.

Grammy-winning songwriter, singer, and record producer Robinson traces the story of her nearly 40-year friendship and songwriting partnership with Leonard Cohen, giving glimpses of life behind the scenes, performing songs they wrote together and showing photographic imagery.

One of the UK’s best-known poets and storytellers, Michael Rosen caught Covid-19 towards the beginning of the pandemic, becoming seriously ill and being placed in a coma by doctors so he could get better. Join him in conversation with Rachel Clarke as he discusses his new memoir Getting Better, the follow-up to 2021’s Many Different Kinds of Love, in which explores the role of trauma, asks how it’s possible to live well again after a tragedy such as a chronic illness or the loss of a loved one and ponders what it means to be recovered. Rosen, a former children’s laureate, is the author of more than 140 books. Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic.

Musician and writer Nick Cave and journalist Seán O’Hagan discuss their book, Faith, Hope and Carnage. Drawing on more than 40 hours of conversations between Cave and O’Hagan, the book takes readers from Cave’s early childhood to the present day, through his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years, and examines questions of faith, art, music, freedom, grief and love. This is an inspiring and hopeful conversation, and a rare chance to hear directly from a creative visionary.

There is one question that Butler-Gallie is asked regularly: “What made you become a priest?” Talking to journalist and editor Alex Clark about his irreverent memoir Touching Cloth: A Year in the Life of a Young Priest, he reveals what it’s like to become a young priest in the 21st century, correcting misconceptions about his vocation with humour and a light touch. From sharing stories about unusual problems with parishioners to how to keep a straight face when someone is inadvertently hot-boxing a funeral, Butler-Gaillie’s book is also a love letter to the Church of England and to the community of people who keep it going.

The poet discusses his deeply humane and brutally hilarious boyhood memoir Toy Fights with broadcaster and journalist Sarfraz Manzoor. Born in Dundee, Paterson spent his boyhood on a council housing estate, dodging kids who wanted to kill him in a game of Toy Fights and obsessing over everything from origami to sex and Scottish football cards. The first 20 years of his life – for better or worse – shaped who he would become. His story is one of family, money and music, as well as schizophrenia, hell, narcissists, debt and the working class. Paterson has won some of the country’s most prestigious poetry prizes, and spent 25 years as a poetry editor.

Nature writer Roger Deakin helped popularise wild swimming with Waterlog, published in 1999. He was a polymath, adventurer, romantic and rebel who embraced self-sufficiency, teaching and environmentalism, acquiring a 16th-century farmhouse in the 1970s and rebuilding it from the oak beams up. Discover more about Deakin’s inner life with the Guardian’s natural history writer Patrick Barkham, author of this definitive biography. The Swimmer is told primarily in Deakin’s own words, with Barkham drawing on notebooks, diaries, letters, recordings and more to access his work.

Combining chart-topping pop music with the theories of Carl Jung and Brene Brown, the 7 Days singer recounts the highs and lows of his high-profile career and offers advice and philosophy for those undergoing difficult times.

“I am now in a place where I've learned to have good vibes, to be true to myself, but it hasn’t always been this way. This is not a traditional memoir – it’s a series of lessons learned from a life lived, many of which I’ve only realised in retrospect – after all, it is only through living that we can learn and grow.

“I’m still learning, still a journeyman, with much to still absorb; still making mistakes, still striving. But I feel privileged now – after a lot of interesting twists and turns along the way – to share my journey with you. This is my story of how I have learned to tune back in and rediscover my good vibes.”

From DJ gigs in Southampton nightclubs to chart-topping global fame, Craig David found overnight success as a teenager. With no place for feelings of insecurity, he learned to push them down, building a reputation as the man who always had a smile on his face. Further down the line, things began to unravel. All the negative feelings Craig had been ignoring rose to the surface. He had to change his thinking.

In Craig’s much-anticipated first book – part-memoir, part self-help – he shares his journey of reinvention, self-love and acceptance, and the lessons he’s learned along the way. He talks to journalist and writer Sarfraz Manzoor.

Memoir, autofiction, a collection of fragments: Martin Shaw’s Bardskull can be read in a number of ways. An authority on mythology, Shaw is keen to liberate it from the library and put it back in the centre of our messy, fear-filled lives. Bardskull is built around three journeys into the heart of Dartmoor. From the deep myths of Dartmoor itself to Arthurian legends and folk tales from India, Persia and more, each story in Bardskull comes as a challenge and a threat. Shaw discusses the book, and reads from it, offering the audience the chance to make up their own mind about what, exactly, Bardskull is. Shaw talks to Rosie Goldsmith, journalist and Director of the European Literature Network.

The Canadian singer/songwriter is fiercely honest about her 25 years as a recording and touring artist in her memoir Song of the Sparrow. To celebrate its release, and its accompanying album, Tara MacLean shares tales from her book, interspersed with guitar music and song, for a uniquely intimate evening of storytelling.

An exploration of memory, memoir and the process of reflection through writing with frank, tender and sometimes funny thoughts from two writers who have written about personal losses – Margaret Atwood of her long-term partner, and Rob Delaney of his son from a brain tumour. The pair share reflections on writing about the worst things imaginable, the power of language to express humanity and the impact of memoir. Their compassionate and honest insights speak to society’s need to understand, and work through, one of life’s most painful experiences. Delaney’s A Heart That Works is a moving memoir about losing his son Henry; Atwood’s Dearly is a collection of poems about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals.

Sue Barker was just 15 when she was sent to a junior tennis championship in France alone, told she had to win the money to pay for her return fare; five years later she was Britain’s number one tennis player. The grit and determination she applied to her tennis has also been seen in her long-running broadcasting career, during which she’s interviewed some of the world’s top sporting legends. Barker has now turned the focus on herself in her memoir Calling the Shots. In conversation with BBC Sport and CNN reporter Phil Jones, she talks about her hard-won success in tennis and broadcasting, relives some of the nation's biggest sporting dramas and gives us an understanding of her trailblazing career.

A candid look into the literary life of Wales through the eyes of two men deeply connected to the words of the country. Dai Smith’s memoir Off the Track: Traces of Memory looks back at his time as a writer and historian, broadcaster, chair of the Arts Council of Wales, editor of the Library of Wales, chair of the Dylan Thomas Prize and editor of BBC Wales. Sam Adams’ Letters from Wales: Memories and Encounters in Literature and Life is a collection of his columns over 30 years in the poetry magazine PN Review, offering insights into the literary lives and culture of Wales. In conversation with the editor of the Wales Arts Review, Dr Emma Schofield.

Writer and broadcaster Octavia Bright talks to Dan Richards about her recovery from alcohol addiction, and the parallel story of her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s, as she discusses her new memoir. Moving between London, Cornwall, New York and more, This Ragged Grace is a story of navigating seemingly impossible things without old fixes, and about a reckoning with addiction, loss, self and hope in your twenties and thirties. Bright co-hosts the podcast Literary Friction and has also presented programmes for BBC Radio 4.

Thea Lenarduzzi’s Dandelions is a family memoir and social history which explores the evocative power of shared language and stories tracing four generations of migration between Italy and England. Colombian author Pilar Quintana’s The Abyss leads us brilliantly into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, driven by fear of abandonment, through the character of impressionable eight-year-old Claudia. The authors discuss family relations and gender inequality through their books, with author and translator Daniel Hahn.

Family shapes who we are and is one of the things we all have in common. In The World: A Family History, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore takes us through the story of humanity via the unit of the family. Starting with the footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago, he covers the families that have shaped our worlds, from the Medicis and Rothschilds to the Churchills, Kennedys, Kims and more. Simon Sebag Montefiore is in conversation with journalist and presenter Sangita Myska.