John le Carré is still at the top, more than half a century after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a worldwide bestseller. From his bleak childhood – the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by ‘sixteen hugless years’ in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man – through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction which includes some of the finest novels published. Written with exclusive access to le Carré himself, to his private archive and to many of the people closest to him, Adam Sisman has produced a major biography of one of the most important novelists alive today.

To launch the book, he will be in discussion with Robert McCrum, associate editor of the Observer.

Part of I Spy…John le Carré, a weekender celebrating the launch of Bristol-based Adam Sisman’s biography on celebrated author John le Carré – including the full 1979 seven-part BBC mini-series of Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, a screening of the recent film version, and Sisman himself in conversation with Robert McCrum, associate editor of the Observer.

Image credit: Jonathan Ring

Adam Sisman and Robert McCrum

Adam Sisman is the author of a number biographies, including The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge (2006), Hugh-Trevor Roper: The Biography (2010), and Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (1999), which was shortlisted for various prizes, including the Whitbread, and won the American National Books Critics Circle’s Biography Prize. His latest book, a biography of John le Carré, will be published in October 2015. He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Robert McCrum is an associate editor of the Observer. He was born and educated in Cambridge. For nearly 20 years he was editor-in-chief of the publishers Faber & Faber. He is the co-author of The Story of English (1986), and has written six novels. He was the literary editor of the Observer from 1996 to 2008, and has been a regular contributor to the Guardian since 1990.