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Interview

Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell, popular author of engaging books about exciting ideas, chats with Tim Madigan about Iris Murdoch, Montaigne, the meaning of hope, humanism, fallibility, and her own life, among other topics.

Sarah Bakewell is a British author. Her best-selling works include the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Chatto and Windus, 2010), At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016), and Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (Penguin Press, 2023). She is the recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Nonfiction, for work that “unknots complex philosophical thought with verve and wit; her eye for detail and her animated conversation bring readers to inhabit the lives of great philosophers.”

How did you become interested in philosophy?

It started when I was a teenager, reading people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus – all the usual existentialist types.

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