Rose Tremain, 83, on Writing and a Dying Generation

Rose Tremain has published a new novel about Daphne du Maurier at the age of 83, and she has no plans to stop writing.

The bestselling author reflects on age and creativity in a piece published in The Guardian on 25 September 2026, timed to the release of her latest book. Her assessment of her literary cohort is blunt: "My generation of writers is dying."

Tremain cites the evidence. Of Granta's fabled list of 20 Best of Young British Novelists, published in 1983, six are now dead. The losses include, in her words, "our most princely satirist, Martin Amis."

She writes with dark wit about the milestones her generation faces: "We're all approaching birthdays where the cake is too small for the candles."

The survivors carry wounds of different kinds. Salman Rushdie was injured by an attacker's knife. Julian Barnes lives with blood cancer. Others, Tremain observes, live with "the fatal hurt of being forgotten."

Her questions about the future are pointed. "But what's the likely fate of those of us who are surviving – for now?" she asks. "Do readers still love us?"

Tremain also considers the signals sent when a peer steps away. When Barnes announced that he was signing off because of illness, she wondered whether he was also intuiting something larger: that "the younger generations had heard enough from us old birds and geezers who were young when Sean Connery had dimples, when David Hockney first coloured his hair yellow?"

The essay spans 70 years of writing life, tracing a career that began when Tremain's generation occupied the cultural foreground that younger writers now claim. Her frame of reference stretches from Connery's early screen years to Hockney's first yellow hair — markers of a era when the novelists of 1983 were the rising names in British fiction.

Now Tremain stands among the last of that cohort still producing new work. Her answer to the question of late-life creativity is the novel itself: a book about Daphne du Maurier, another British writer whose reputation long outlasted her moment.

At 83, Tremain's position is unambiguous. She reflects on age and creativity, she acknowledges the losses mounting around her — and she keeps writing, with no intention of signing off.