Claire Tomalin

Biographer Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. After working in publishing, she became literary editor of both the New Statesman magazine and the Sunday Times newspaper. She is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Wordsworth Trust, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Vice-President of English PEN. Her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys (2002) won the Samuel Pepys Award, and the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Her most recent book is Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), shortlisted for the British Book Awards Biography of the Year. She is married to playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.

“In my study I have several prints. One is of the Reading Room in the British Library, where I worked for many years, and there’s a poster of Urbino, a town I really love where Michael and I have spent a lot of time. There’s my London Library bag (very important!) and I’m very fond of this mobile that my youngest daughter Emily gave me. It always makes me think of her.”

“I’m very restless, so it’s good that I often have to go and fetch books from other parts of the house. Someone once asked me what I would take from my sturdy if it was burning down; one thing only. I thought, in the end, there’s nothing one could take. I’ve reached the age where you can’t take things with you; objects. You just have to walk out of the study with what’s inside your head, and start again from that. ”