Tegan Bennett-Daylight

Thanks so much, Kate.

It's lovely to be with you all.

It came out of many, many years of close reading and many, many years of teaching.

I would often get students saying to me, nothing's ever happened to me.

I have no story to tell.

And my response was, yeah, well, there are only about three or four stories.

So you're probably right about that.

But one thing that does belong particularly to every person is detail.

So I'm always encouraging them.

I got a beautiful piece from a student the other day where she wrote about the way the caravan rocked under her parents' footsteps when they went away on holiday.

So it's those things that I'm talking about when I talk about detail.

And I think it's that that I notice most of all in a book.

I absolutely agree with that, and actually I've been a big reader of good genre fiction for a long time, and I used to love the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, and there's something about she does light really beautifully, she does smell really beautifully.

There's something very vivid about the way she writes.

I could not tell you a single one of her plots, but I can remember the feel of the books.

Same with Conan Doyle, actually.

I almost can never get enough, to be brutally honest.

I read Proust a couple of years ago for the first time.

And in Proust, you just drown in detail.

And I seemed to have just an endless amount of time for it.