Laureation address: Sebastian Faulks CBE FRSL

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Professor John Burnside, School of English

Thursday 16 June 2022

Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Sebastian Faulks.

Sebastian Faulks was born in Donnington, near Newbury in Berkshire in 1953 and attended Elstree School near Reading. He went as top scholar to Wellington College then won an open exhibition to read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating in 1974. In the year between school and university he had studied in Paris and learned to speak French. He subsequently worked on various newspapers – including the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent and the Guardian. However, his success as a novelist meant that in a 2005 interview he could say, “I haven’t had a proper job for years and would now be unemployable”.

Many of us will know Sebastian Faulks’ considerable body of work, from the trilogy of novels that established his early reputation (1989’s The Girl at the Lion d'Or, the powerful First World War contemporary classic, Birdsong, from 1993, and, in 1999, Charlotte Gray, a beautifully nuanced study of a Special Operations agent in Vichy France during World War II). 

The following decades brought a highly diverse crop of novels: On Green Dolphin Street, a study of American lives in the mid-century, Human Traces, in which Faulks explores the treatment of mental illness, and the dark and morally complex Engleby, a tour de force in the unreliable narrator genre of which Telegraph book critic, Jane Shilling, said: "Engleby is distinguished by a remarkable intellectual energy: a narrative verve, technical mastery of the possibilities of the novel form and a vivid sense of the tragic contingency of human life”. 

Most recently, The Sunday Times bestseller, Snow Country appeared in 2021, a book that, in the words of Guardian critic Stephanie Merritt: “powerfully evokes the mood of a continent that still has not processed its collective trauma, even as the threat of another looms”. It is, in many respects, a classic Faulks novel, in its engagement with fundamental ideas of history, freedom, memory and hope, seen through the eyes of characters who remain unforgettably etched into the reader’s mind long after the novel closes. According to its publishers, Snow Country marks the second volume of a projected ‘Austrian Trilogy’, which began with Human Traces – which means that there is much to look forward to in the coming years – news that should gladden all lovers of fine fiction, for Sebastian Faulks is undeniably, as Shilling notes, a master of the novel form.

Though he claims to have “no scientific background at all”, Sebastian Faulks has been honoured by The Tavistock Clinic in recognition of his contribution to the understanding of psychiatry in Human Traces. As part of his work with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, he wrote the narrative for the Battle of the Somme centenary service at Thiepval on July 1, 2016, as well as Prince William’s speech at the vigil on the previous evening. Currently, he is Chair of the Charlotte Aitken Trust, an organisation that aims to continue the work of the great literary agent, Gillon Aitken, by encouraging and promoting new literary talent.

In a 2018 interview with Kate Kellaway, he said: “I know writers in their 60s who have told me, candidly, that they are writing only to help pay the bills and no longer have any real zip or desire. But I always feel that the glorious thing is just beyond my reach…”. Many readers would argue that he has already captured some extraordinarily glorious things in his writing, but we can be thankful that he continues to possess the zip and desire to strive for further glories.

Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to literature, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Sebastian Faulks.