Sheila Hancock, Bloomsbury Institute

Since the 1950s Sheila Hancock has been vivifying characters on stage to much acclaim. Her talents have won her an Olivier, and an OBE for her services to drama. She’s worked extensively both directing and acting with The National Theatre and the RSC and is also a familiar face from big and small screen.

She’s already shown herself to be a sensitive, subtle and absorbing prose writer, as she captured an intimate portrait of her marriage to actor John Thaw and the intensity of her grief following his death in The Two of Us, then the painful yet exhilarating readjustment to life alone as a widow in Just Me. Both memoirs went on to become best-sellers, speaking candidly about deeply personal matters to which a vast array of readers could relate. Hancock won author of the year in 2005

Now, for the first time, Hancock has created her own characters and plot in her debut novel Miss Carter’s War. The story follows beautiful and bold young Marguerite Carter as, suddenly orphaned, she risks her own life working behind enemy lines in WWII, then leaves her lover behind to become the first woman to graduate from Cambridge, before going on to teach in an all-girls' grammar school, where her own bravery and belief in social justice and peace make Miss Carter an inspiring educator. In Hancock's rousing narrative we see Britain from the chaotic aftermath of war, through the swinging sixties into Thatcherism and beyond.

Tickets are £10, or £25 with a copy of the book, which will be posted upon publication.