RENOWNED biographer Claire Tomalin is to receive the Bodleian Library’s highest honour.

She will be presented with the Bodley Medal at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday, March 17, when she will be in conversation with Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden.

Ms Tomalin is widely regarded as one of today’s leading biographers.

She has written highly praised studies of women writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen, throwing new light on their struggles and their achievements.

The author used the resources of the Bodleian for her research into Wollstonecraft and Shelley.

Ms Tomalin also visited the library when researching the life of the 17th-century diarist and civil servant Samuel Pepys.

Her biography Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, published in 2002, became Whitbread Book of the Year and won the Mary Crawshay prize from the British Academy.

In her account of her own life, published last year, Ms Tomalin set her personal experience in a wide cultural and political context, portraying the social pressures on women of her generation.

Past medal winners include novelist and screenwriter William Boyd, classicist Mary Beard, and physicist Stephen Hawking.

The library is a cultural partner of the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival, which runs from Saturday, March 17 to Sunday, March 25.

The exhibition, Sappho to Suffrage, opens from March 6 in the Bodleian’s Weston Library.