Writing a Life: Hermione Lee, Daniel Lee and Rachel Holmes

Biographers of Tom Stoppard, Sylvia Pankhurst and a little known SS soldier compare notes. How does the process differ if your subject is alive, if their story has already been enshrined in history, if they were active in the Nazi regime? Anne McElvoy talks to three authors about researching and writing a life history and the journeys it has taken them on from a Nazi letter discovered in an armchair, to the play scripts by a living dramatist who fled Nazi occupation in Czechoslovakia and has become part of the British arts establishment to the campaigning travels of a suffragette to Soviet Russia, Scandinavia, Europe & East Africa.

Professor Dame Hermione Lee's latest biography is called Tom Stoppard: A Life. It's Book of the Week from October 5th on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. She has previously written on Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald. Rachel Holmes is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. Her previous book was Eleanor Marx: A Life Daniel Lee has written The SS Officer's Armchair: In Search of a Hidden Life. He teaches at Queen Mary, University of London and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn academic research into radio.

Delve into our website and you can find episodes exploring Suffrage history with Fern Riddell and Helen Pankhurst amongst the guests https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09th2dt Programmes about German history including Neil Mcgregor and Philip Sands https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079mcgf or Sophie Hardach and Florian Huber https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006sjx A debate about Jewish identity in 2020 with guests including Howard Jacobson and Bari Weiss https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fwqd And there's Hermione Lee looking at Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zt79p You can find more in the Prose and Poetry collection on the Free Thinking website.

Producer: Ruth Watts