 I'm here this evening at the British Library to discuss the business of being archived. We're talking about books and we're talking about archives and literature, and I can't think of any better way to spend the time. It's going to be an evening discussing what it's like to be archived and what it's like to use an archive for practical purposes. The British Library has thought the archives of Will Self and Hanif Koreshi. I used to work in the British Library, so the idea that I would be either one of those books or indeed archive is incredible to me. I've always been as a writer concerned with the next book. Even though I kind of laboriously kept all of this paper, I was never quite sure why I was keeping it. What the BL have is hundreds of these police reporter notebooks. I honestly believe that my writing is utterly in decipherable to anybody but Hanif. Well I'm not interested in it. An event like this can really give you the chance to talk about some of the intimate details. That's the sort of thing that biographers love, but which they rarely get a chance to talk about in public.