The Booker-winning author on starting late as a writer, her clear recall of growing up in Cairo, and the TV programme that kept her going during lockdown

Penelope Lively, the author of many novels and short story collections, is the only writer to have won both the Booker prize (in 1987, for her novel Moon Tiger) and the Carnegie Medal, an award that recognises an outstanding book for children and young adults (in 1973, for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe). Among her memoirs is Oleander, Jacaranda, about her childhood in Cairo before and during the second world war. Her latest book, Metamorphosis: Selected Stories, spans 40 years of writing. She lives in London.

You edited Metamorphosis yourself. Was it hard to choose which stories to include?
In a way it was easy. I kept thinking, “Oh my God, not that one!” I did feel I was exercising editorial judgment. There are two new stories, written in 2018. At the time, they were a problem: they’re quite long, but they were too short to be published as novellas; effectively, they’d been shoved in a box. I thought: “Oh good, we can use those, too.”

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Source: The Guardian