Peter Kemp talks to Toby Lichtig

Critic and chief fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times Peter Kemp says the last 50 years has brought a huge variety of English fiction but they are all linked by an obsession for the past.

There have been bulky novels and minimalist works, and experiments in form from novels in verse to Twitter narratives. Kemp argues that the link is a novelistic preoccupation with history, from the imperial and political to the personal and literary. And he casts his eye over some famous names from the UK, US and wider anglophone world including Salman Rushdie, Sarah Waters, Toni Morrison and Hilary Mantel.

Kemp was fiction editor of the Sunday Times between 1994 and 2010 and is now the newspaper’s chief fiction reviewer. He has judged many literary awards including the Booker Prize and the Betty Trask Award. His previous books include Muriel Spark; H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape; and a study of Edith Wharton. He is editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, an associate editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and a regular interviewer for Oxford Literary Festival. Here he talks to Toby Lichtig, journalist, broadcaster and fiction and politics editor of the Times Literary Supplement.