Mick Herron Interviewed by Chris Patten

One of Britain’s best thriller writers Mick Herron talks to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford Lord Chris Patten about his life and his writing of crime fiction.

Herron’s Slough House novels have been shortlisted for eight CWA daggers, winning twice. The first, Slow Horses, was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of ‘the 20 greatest spy novels of all time’ and has just been adapted into a new Apple TV series starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. A further two series have been commissioned. The latest novel in the Slough House series is Bad Actors. Herron is also author of the Zoe Boëhm detective series, set in Oxford, and novels including Reconstruction and This is What Happened.

He lives in Oxford. Here he talks to Patten, a former Conservative Party MP and minister in the Thatcher and Major governments, the last governor of Hong Kong and a former European Commissioner for External Relations. Previous Chancellor’s Lectures have included Dr Mario Vargas Llosa (2009), Jung Chang (2011), Vikram Seth (2012), Seamus Heaney (2013), Orhan Pamuk (2014), Amitav Ghosh (2015), Professor Frank Dikötter (2017), Sebastian Barry (2018), Robert Harris (2019), Penelope Lively (2022).