Dame Margaret Drabble is the author of seventeen highly acclaimed novels. She has also written biographies and screenplays, and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. 

‘This is what is so interesting about life: choosing to be something and being struck down while you do it by a falling brick. The whole question of free will and choice and determinism is inevitably interesting to a novelist.’ Margaret Drabble, The Art of Fiction No. 70, Paris Review 1978