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It was fun to be inducted into the Royal Society of Literature (after 37 years of writing!) last month. The ceremony involves writing your name in a ledger, which is less straightforward than it seems, given that the pen I used was George Eliot’s very own dipping ink quill. As my pursed lips and minutely protruded tongue indicate, it took child-like concentration to ensure the spidery track vaguely resembled a signature. Of the six pens offered, I chose this instrument because Eliot, as far as I know (in Adam Bede), was the first writer to commit to literature the Derbyshire dialect: the idiom of my childhood in Buxton (image my Mary Muir).

What do you see here? I have been consumed by the act of looking for all of my writerly life. This year I turned it into a book, The Nature of Seeing (Jonathan Cape, Oct 2026), with help from my agent Sophie Lambert and editor Bea Hemming and a title courtesy of Mary Muir. Being able to look carefully at the world is not a passive act, it is hugely dynamic. In the preface I write:

‘The gift of sight is not, of course, granted to all and those who lack it often develop compensating sensory awareness that is even more remarkable. Yet I have come to believe that the act of seeing is one of the most important things that many of us will ever do. It is the precondition of all our understanding. Leonardo considered it the essential prelude to love for the world. It earths our experience of the truth. It is the foreground to all our imaginative work, it leads us to a state of wonder, to a sense of what is most sacred in life. Seeing is vital to being healthful and even to being truly alive.’

It is the slimmest of my 14 books, yet I couldn’t be more excited. I note further in the introduction:

‘This is by a fair margin the shortest book I have published but, in one sense, it is the most important. The themes and the conceptual frame have drawn upon a whole life. More than anything I have previously written, it tries to capture parts of myself that are most precious. It is a distillate of my Nature looking, which has been continuous since I was twelve. My deepest hope is that some of those first feelings for the living world are still apparent here.’