Rumer Godden’s biographer and daughter join together to look back at the life and writing of the author of Black Narcissus and The Greengage Summer. Godden’s novels have recently been republished, many of them in the Virago Modern Classics series. Godden, who died in 1998 aged 91, is considered by many to be one of the foremost authors of the 20th century. She drew on her life in both Britain and India and on her career as a dancer. Nine of her works have been made into films, including Black Narcissus with Jean Simmons and Deborah Kerr, and The Greengage Summer with Kenneth More, Jane Asher and Susannah York.

Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic and author of Rumer Godden:  A Storyteller’s Life, the definitive biography of Godden that draws on private letters and on conversations with the writer herself. Her first biography, Nancy Cunard, won the Silver PEN prize for non-fiction, and the biography of Lord Beaverbrook she wrote jointly with her husband, Michael Davie, was runner up for the Hawthornden prize.  Jane Murray Flutter is the daughter of Rumer Godden and a board member of the Rumer Godden Literary Trust.