Penelope Lively, author and keen gardener, will be discussing her new book "Life in the Garden" with Tim Richardson, Journalist and landscape critic.
Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother’s garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own, and the smaller urban garden in the North London home she lives in today. It is also a wise, engaging and far-ranging exploration of gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland, and of writers and their gardens, from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.
Penelope and Tim will discuss “Life in the Garden” and the place of gardens in her work.
The talk will be followed by a signing of Life in the Garden.
“Any time spent with Penelope Lively is a joy” -Observer
Speaker Biographies
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Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt and spent her childhood there. She came to England at the age of twelve, in 1945, and went to boarding school in Sussex. She went on to read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1957 she married Jack Lively (who died in 1998). They had two children, Josephine and Adam. Jack Lively's academic career took the family from Swansea to Sussex and Oxford, and eventually to Warwick University, where he was Professor of Politics. Penelope Lively won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger, and she has been shortlisted for it twice more, with The Road to Lichfield and According To Mark. Penelope Lively now has six grandchildren and lives in London.
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Tim Richardson
Tim Richardson
Tim Richardson, garden historian and landscape critic, is an irreverent commentator on all matters pertaining to gardens. He was gardens editor at Country Life, at *Wallpaper magazine and edited New Eden, the contemporary gardens magazine. He is now a regular columnist in the gardening pages of the Daily Telegraph.