Liz Hodgkinson, author of From a Girl to a Man: How Laura become Michael, has been interviewed in Ox Magazine as part of a full feature on authors appearing at the Oxford Literature Festival.

Liz talks of the sadness Dianna Cowell has felt all her life from not knowing her dad, who died in 2011. “She tried and tried to contact Roberta,” she says of Diana. “She found out where she was living, wrote to her, and never got any reply.

“She has no memory at all of her father. What she’s doing now is trying to fill in a huge gap in her life. So having her at the festival will add a lot to it, she’s really the only living link with the whole story.”

Roberta’s story actually became a worldwide sensation in 1954, so that’s been something else for Diana to get her head around.

Liz is clear about the ambition of the pair’s festival appearance. “One of the things we’re going to do is try and get to the bottom of what it’s all about,” she says. “There’s still a lot of confusion. People tend to think that transgender people are not quite right in the head but they are, they’re perfectly normal, they just feel that they’re in the wrong body.”

The First Sex Changes: How Laura Became Michael and Robert Became Roberta takes place on Wednesday 6th April, 4pm at Bodleian’s Divinity School

Read the full interview with Ox Magazine here. 

You can buy tickets to Liz’s event at Oxford Literature Festival here,  and buy From a Girl to a Man from Quartet Books here, or from Amazon here. 

We’re excited to announce that five Quartet authors are reading at Oxford Literature festival this year. The festival runs from Saturday 2 to Sunday 10 April and features events for children, young people and adults.

The authors who will be speaking include Liz Hodgkinson, author of FROM A GIRL TO A MAN: HOW LAURA BECAME MICHAEL, Jim Lee who wrote the memoir Life in B&W, Jayne Haynes and Marin Scurr, author of Doctors Dissected which was recently released in paperback, and Lucy Beresford, author of Invisible Threads and soon to be published Hungry for Love.

There’s still time to get tickets, so check out the links to the events below:

• Wednesday 6 April 2016 4pm – Liz Hodgkinson and Diana Cowell: The First Sex Changes: How Laura Became Michael and Robert Became Roberta – buy tickets here 
• Friday 8 April 2016 4pm – Jim Lee talks to Paul Blezard: Life in B&W – buy tickets here 
• Saturday 9 April 2016 2pm –  Martin Scurr and Cosmo Scurr, Chaired by Jane Haynes: Doctors Dissected – buy tickets here
• Sunday 10 April 2016 10am – Lucy Beresford and Leila Segal, Voices of Freedom: Fighting Oppression of Women – buy tickets here

You can view the full programme for Oxford Literature Festival here, and check out more Quartet books here.