A Life in Writing: Andrew O’Hagan talks to Derek Johns

One of Britain’s leading novelists and essayists discusses his life in writing

Andrew O’Hagan is one of Britain’s leading novelists and essayists, a public intellectual who through his books and the pages of the London Review of Books has engaged with many of the key issues of his time. His latest novel is Mayflies, which was published to great acclaim last autumn. The subjects of his LRB essays include Julian Assange, the Grenfell fire, the Dark Web and Bitcoin. He will be in conversation with Derek Johns, who was his literary agent from the start of his career.

“My god this is gorgeous. Wild, wise, wonderful . . . Absolutely brilliant.“

Russell T Davies – Mayflies, A Guardian, Spectator, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Evening Standard Book of the Year

Andrew O’Hagan

Andrew O’Hagan is one of his generation’s most exciting and most serious chroniclers of contemporary Britain. He has three times been nominated for the Booker Prize. He was voted one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His novels have been translated into 15 languages and have been adapted for stage and television. Andrew is also a well-known non-fiction writer. His essays and reports have appeared in London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian and The New Yorker. He lives in London and Edinburgh. 

Derek Johns

Derek Johns has been a bookseller, editor, publisher and literary agent.  He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has served as a trustee of English PEN and as a member of the advisory committee of the Booker Prize Foundation.  His book Ariel: A Literary Biography of Jan Morris was published in 2016.

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