John Mitchinson

And the third novel she writes, Offshore, and these three novels come out in the space of three years, the third novel wins the Booker Prize.

Yeah.

One of the things I got from reading Hermione Lee's biography is not the sense that she had got lucky, but that she had waited, although she would have preferred not to.

She had waited so that when the moment came, she was ready to go.

Right.

And she had the stories and had the way of approaching them.

And also, apparently her final papers, her tutor at Oxford, Somerville, was so impressed that he said, may I keep these?

And he had them bound in vellum because they were perceived as being the greatest set of essays that an undergraduate had ever produced.

And then she goes into hibernation for 40 years as a writer, as a writer.

I just want to ask George one more thing about, so she was actually, that description John read, she was a teacher for 25 years, wasn't she?

She stayed teaching even after she published half a dozen novels.

She taught you, she taught Patrick Marber, she taught Edward St.

Aubin, quite a lot of... Anna Wintour.

Anna Wintour, yeah.

Quite a lot of famous people went through that.

Tilda Swinton.

People who follow me on Twitter or listen to this podcast regularly will know that I, in fact, Lucy was taking the mickey out of me earlier because I read publicly.

Anyway, I'd just like to say to listeners that the reading experience of... I did them nearly in the order in which she wrote them.

The novels, that is.

But the experience of reading them in the order in which she wrote them is one I really strongly recommend to people.