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My name is Seamus Perry and I teach English at the University of Oxford and I'm here today to talk to Mark Ford,

who's professor of English at the University College London.

We are both contributors, London Viewer Books, me merely proseerely Prose, Mark, both prose and poetry.

And we are here to talk about the poetry and the life of Philip Larkin.

This has been prompted by a number of things.

One was the relatively recent publication of a big defensive biography of Larkin by James Booth, who's a great scholar of Larkin at the University of Hull.

Also, the arrival of Larkin in Westminster Abbey, posthumously. And finally, 2017 is Hull's turn to be

the city of culture in which Larkin is bound to loom very large. So we thought, for those

reasons alone, it would be a good idea to talk about Larkin and try and reassess his importance

and why he still matters as a poet today. Larkin features very largely in the archives of the

London Review of books. Many great pieces about him have appeared in the pages of the LRB by Barbara Everett and John Bailey and Alan Bennett and Jenny Disky and other people. And we may be referring to some of those as we continue our conversation. But perhaps a good place to start would be where Larkin started, and it's perhaps

not where we might think he started, which is to say, although he always wrote poems, his earliest

ambitions as a literary figure were to write novels. And I wonder, Mark, if you might say something

about that. Where do we place these early novels that Larkin wrote?

What are they like?

I think they're wonderful.

Two novels he wrote in his very early 20s.

Giel was published when he was only 21, I think,

and the book published as A Girl in Winter,

...