Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-03-21

Acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee's new book Tom Stoppard: A Life, has been hailed as 'a prodigious achievement' (Sunday Times). As part of the Royal Society of Literature's RSL200 celebrations she will be sharing her unparalleled insight into the extraordinary life and work of Britain's greatest living playwright, Tom Stoppard.

Lee draws upon unprecedented access to diaries, letters, and countless interviews – from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman, Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg – to build a meticulously researched portrait. In this conversation Lee will discuss the complex, elusive and private focus of her latest biography, the challenge of tackling a living subject, and what it takes to write a life. She will be in conversation with the journalist and broadcaster Mark Lawson.

Hermione Lee is a literary biographer and Professor Emeritus of English Literature. She was President of Wolfson College Oxford from 2008 to 2017, where she founded the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing in 2011. Her publications include biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald (which won the James Tait Black Prize and was one of the New York Times’s 10 best books of 2014), books on Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bowen and Philip Roth, and books on life-writing: Biography: A Very Short Introduction (OUP) and Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (Chatto & Windus). Her biography of Tom Stoppard was published by Faber in October 2020 to great acclaim.

She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow and Council member of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship, and was announced as Chair of the David Cohen Prize in 2020.