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Diana Athill is one of the most remarkable writers you could hope to meet. She won the Costa Biography Award at the age of 82 for her memoir Somewhere Towards the End. She helped André Deutsch set up the publishing company and worked as an editor at Deutsch for four decades. Added to that, she has written five volumes of highly acclaimed memoirs. Her latest work is Instead of a Book: Letters to a Friend, her correspondence with American poet Edward Field from 1981 to the present day.

In one of a series of events around the theme of ageing in association with Age UK Oxfordshire, she talks to broadcaster, journalist and novelist Joan Bakewell about a life that has been fully lived. Bakewell has criticised the absence of older women on British TV and was appointed as the ‘voice’ of the elderly by the last Labour government. She has had a long and fulfilling career as a broadcaster and journalist, and recently published her second novel at the age of 78.

‘Athill’s memoirs display a vivacious appreciation of the life she has lived and what is still to come’ New Statesman