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Award-winning novelist, playwright and literary critic David Lodge looks back at his life and the early formative influences that turned him into the writer he is today. Lodge’s latest book is Quite A Good Time to be Born: A Memoir: 1935-1975 which reflects on his life from the moment of his birth in 1935. As the title suggests, Lodge considers 1935 was a good year for a future writer to be born. He was four when World War Two began and his formative years were ones of great upheaval and change – the perfect material for a future writer. Lodge reflects on his childhood and youth and the impact it had on his later writing.

Lodge’s novels have been translated into 25 languages and include Changing Places, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, How Far Can You Go?, Whitbread Book of the Year, and Small World, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written television screenplays, stage plays and works of literary criticism. He is emeritus professor of English literature at Birmingham, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a CBE and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Here he talks to deputy editor of the Financial Times John Thornhill.

Lodge will receive the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival Honorary Fellowship for his outstanding contribution to literature at the close of this event.

Sponsored by Blackwell’s.