After Dinner Speakers: Susan Hill, Lauren Bacall, Eddie Murphy

Novelist, children's writer and playwright Susan (Elizabeth) Hill was born in Scarborough, England, on 5 February 1942. She was educated at Scarborough Convent School and at grammar school in Coventry, before reading English at King's College, London, graduating in 1963 and becoming a Fellow in 1978. Her first novel, The Enclosure, was published in 1961 when she was still a student. She worked as a freelance journalist between 1963 and 1968, publishing her third novel, Gentleman and Ladies, in 1968. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972 and was a presenter of BBC Radio 4's 'Bookshelf' from 1986 to 1987. In 1996 she started her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, editing and publishing a quarterly literary journal, Books and Company, in 1998. She won a Somerset Maugham Award for I'm the King of the Castle (1970); the Whitbread Novel Award for The Bird of Night (1972); and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Albatross (1971), a collection of short stories. Her other novels include Strange Meeting (1971), set during the First World War, In the Springtime of the Year (1974), Air and Angels (1991), and most recently, The Service of Clouds (1998). The Woman in Black (1983), a Victorian ghost story, was successfully adapted for stage and television and Mrs de Winter (1993) is a sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Susan Hill is also the author of two volumes of memoir, The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year (1982), about her life in rural Oxfordshire during the 1970s, and Family (1989), in which she writes about her early life in Scarborough. Her books for children include The Glass Angels (1991), Beware, Beware (1993) and King of Kings (1993). She has also written radio plays, a number of books of non-fiction and has edited several anthologies of short stories including two volumes of The Penguin Book of Modern Women's Short Stories, published in 1991 and 1997. Her most recent book, The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read, a new collection of short stories, is forthcoming in 2003. Susan Hill is married to the Shakespeare scholar Professor Stanley Wells with whom she lives in a farmhouse in the north Cotswolds.