Penelope Lively, now 89 years old, is the author of more than 30 books for children, six short story collections and 17 novels. Shortlisted three times for the Booker prize, she won it in 1987 for her time-shifting novel Moon Tiger, in which a terminally ill woman looks back at wartime adventures, love affairs and fraught family life. Dame Penelope Lively has won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award for her children’s books. She is also the author of three volumes of memoirs.

Dame Penelope recalls her early childhood in Cairo, and how real-life wartime Egypt inspired the fiction of Moon Tiger. Andrew Lang's Tales of Troy and Greece, a retelling of the Homeric myths, first sparked her creative imagination at the age of ten. Having moved to England in late 1945, she remembers the devastation left by the Blitz, and how seeing for herself the ruins in London, both ancient and modern, prompted a lifelong fascination with archaeology. An extremely wide reader, she discusses the influence of her lifetimes' reading habit on her fiction; in particular The Making Of The English Landscape by W.G. Hoskins, a book about the strata of history that have helped shape England, which inspired some of the recurring themes of memory and loss in her own work.

Producer: Edwina Pitman