Style speaks: To author and journalist Hunter Davies OBE

Style speaks

to author and journalist Hunter Davies OBE

With the inaugural Isle of Wight Book Awards wrapped up and the winners crowned, we caught up with co-founder and judge, Hunter Davies, to talk about relocating, writing, and promoting creativity. a new love, a new house, a new island. The house and Island turned out to be ten out of ten. My lady friend alas scored fewer marks and we have now parted.

You swapped your “battered Victorian house” near Hampstead Heath in North London for a Grade 2-listed Regency cottage just a stone’s throw from the beach in Ryde. What do you like most about living in the town?

I can’t see the sea, alas, from my Ryde house but I am only a three-minute walk on the flat to Ryde Sands, which are stunning. So much to do and see and smell and touch and wonder at. The Solent is always alive and every day every tide is different.

New love, a new house and a new life on the Isle of Wight inspired your latest book ‘Love in Old Age: My Year in the Wight House’, which was released last September. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

It is a year in the life of those three loves. What happened. How we got on.

Before your house-hunting holiday to the Isle of Wight in summer 2020, you’d only been here once before (in 1966) to interview the governor of Parkhurst Prison whilst the Great Train Robbers were inmates. What brought you back?

I was looking for a holiday home in a place neither myself nor my girlfriend at the time knew. My wife had died seven years earlier, after 55 years of marriage, and for thirty years we had had a home in Lakeland, near where we were both brought up. I wanted something totally different. I suppose the Island is about the furthest you can get in England from Cumbria. So it was

As we’re sure you know, the Island has inspired many writers including Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and poet Mimi Khalvati. Do you think there’s something about the place that promotes creativity?

Creativity comes from within. You can write anywhere but to live your life you need stimulation, activity, experience, love, and a good bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

Last year, you set up the Isle of Wight Book Awards with Peter Harrigan and Medina Books. What was your motivation?

It was to give something back to the Island, as I had so much out of it. I began the Lakeland Book of the Year Awards 38 years ago and they are still going strong. It was to encourage people to write and possibly self-publish their own story connected with the Island. The response was incredible. I did not realise there was such talent on the Island. And also enterprise.

And finally, what are your plans for the future? Have you got any new books on the horizon that you can tell us about yet?

I am now working on ‘Letters To Margaret’, involving letters to my wife Margaret telling her what has happened to the world, to me, to my family, and to my tortoise since she scarpered off in 2016. She adroitly missed Boris, Trump, Truss, Covid, and the economy collapsing. Very smart of her. I will tell her about my love life which will amuse and entertain her. My daughters will be appalled but she will be fascinated. She loved gossip…