Robert Douglas-Fairhurst talks to Susannah Jowitt

Award-winning writer and English lecturer Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst explains how a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis took him deep into his hopes, fears, loves and loses and talks about the books that sustain him.

Douglas-Fairhurst says the diagnosis sent him into a world of MRI scans, a disobedient body and crushing unpredictability. It also took him deep into his own mind and to the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life was transformed. Douglas-Fairhurst draws a literary map of the journey from well to sick, from Kafka to Barbellion, in an ode to great writing, storytelling, science and the power of the imagination.

‘Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis, and that is because it is about so much more . . . it is simply a beautiful piece of writing.’ The Times

Douglas-Fairhurst is professor of English literature at the University of Oxford. His previous books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland. Here he talks to journalist Susannah Jowitt.