Dame Rose Tremain is one of Britain’s most prolific and popular writers, having written 17 novels and five collections of short stories over the last 50 years. She was one of only six women on Granta magazine's inaugural 1982 list of the best young British novelists, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and others. Her fifth novel Restoration was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1989, she won the Whitbread Prize for Music And Silence in 1999, and was awarded the 2008 Orange Prize - the precursor to the Women’s Prize for Fiction - for her novel The Road Home. Having already been made a CBE in 2007, she became Dame Rose Tremain in 2020 for services to writing. Her most recent work is a short story called The Toy Car.
Rose Tremain tells John Wilson how her father, a largely unsuccessful playwright called Keith Thomson, inspired her childhood interest in storytelling, although he never encouraged her to write. She recalls how she first started writing fiction to help her cope with loneliness in a household where there was little parental affection. Rose recalls how it was a teacher at her boarding school who first recognised her ability and encouraged her to apply for an Oxbridge university place, only to be dissuaded by her mother, who sent her to a finishing school in France instead. She credits the novelist Angus Wilson, one of her English Literature tutors at the University Of East Anglia, for giving her the confidence to write her first novel. She also chooses The Diary Of Samuel Pepys as a major inspiration on her 1989 Booker-shortlisted novel Restoration, which was later turned into a Hollywood film starring Robert Downey Jnr. and Meg Ryan.
Producer: Edwina Pitman