Alexandra Harris and Hermione Lee

Literary biographer Professor Dame Hermione Lee and cultural historian Professor Alexandra Harris talk about their work, grappling with some of the big questions that arise in writing long-form non-fiction. Revisiting key moments of decision and discovery, exploring the inner workings of books, Lee and Harris ask each other about approaches to patterning, structure, handling of time, and the paths not taken.

Harris’s new book, The Rising Down: Lives in a Landscape, is a feat of time travel, chronicling lives in one small patch of England over centuries. Listening for the voices of locals and travellers, farmers and teachers, William Blake and John Constable, Harris asks who has been here and what they have seen. Excavating layers of archival records, fusing epic and miniature, thinking about celebrated and obscure lives side by side, Harris opens new horizons. Her previous books include Romantic Moderns and Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies. She is professor of English at the University of Birmingham. 

Lee is one of the foremost literary critics and biographers, founder of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and emeritus professor of English at the University of Oxford. Her most recent work is Tom Stoppard: A Life, which draws on extensive research into his Czech origins and childhood in India, interviews with his friends and access to his private papers. Lee’s previous work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald. She is currently writing a Life of Anita Brookner.