Mark Haddon

The last thing I’d want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy, and from which I’d have been desperate to escape, if escape had been a possibility. Why then this longing, this echo of some remembered comfort?

Renowned artist and writer Mark Haddon grew up in 1960s and ’70s Northamptonshire, with a sister, and a mother and a father who were not cut out for the job of parenting.

Told in the form of short scenes from an anxious provincial life, and threaded together with photos and illustrations, Leaving Home is Mark’s utterly distinctive childhood memoir. Sad, wickedly funny and brutally honest, it’s also a meditation on the things that fill us with nostalgia, the things we are desperately relieved to have left behind in the past, and why they are sometimes the same.

We’re delighted to welcome Mark to discuss this portrait – simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious – of the artist, both as a child and as an adult.

Chaired by Rachel Clarke