Wendy Perriam, often hailed as one of the UK’s finest living writers, will be inspiring would-be authors on February 15, when she gives a seminar to MA students of publishing and creative writing at Kingston University.

She will also take part in Kingston Readers’ Festival on May 9, when she will join Simon Brett for a talk on comedy.

Perriam, a long-time Surbiton resident, won huge acclaim for 15 novels and six short-story collections, all praised by fellow authors and international reviewers alike for their heady mix of humour, sex and psychological insight.

Her 16th novel, newly published by Robert Hale £18.99, is Broken Places.

Its central character is Eric Parkhill, abandoned as an infant in a recreation ground in Croydon and named after the park keeper who found him.

Growing up in care, with no known relatives, and shunted from home to home, his sole refuge is the public library, where an altruistic librarian saves him from a dead-end future and inspires him to become a librarian himself.

Perriam said: “He finally comes to epitomise the truth of Hemingway’s words – the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Perriam’s own life story is the stuff of novels. Expelled from boarding school for heresy, after being told she was in Satan’s power and in danger of eternal damnation, she went on to read history at Oxford and take on a medley of offbeat jobs, including artists’ model and carnation de-budder.

There followed what she called “swinging 60s wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, suburban conformity and periodic Bedlam”, culminating in the tragic death of her only child a year ago.

Hence her unique, often startling, writing style.

She said: “I am both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the organised author toiling at her desk and the mad woman shrieking in a straitjacket”.