Prue Leith — The Joy (and Reality) of Getting Older

Dame Prue Leith has spent six decades in public life — as a restaurateur, cookery writer, television presenter, and most recently as one of the Great British Bake Off’s most beloved judges. Now in her mid-eighties, she turns her attention inward with Being Old, a memoir that refuses the usual routes of either denial or despair. The book is frank about physical decline, grief, and the narrowing of certain freedoms, while being equally clear-eyed about what accumulates with age: perspective, honesty, and a sharper sense of what actually matters.

At the RSA, Leith will discuss what prompted her to write the book — and why she thinks the culture around aging remains stubbornly dishonest. The conversation will range across the practical and the philosophical: how relationships shift, how creative work changes, and how older people can resist being talked about as a problem rather than engaged with as people who have something to say.

This is a talk for anyone thinking seriously about the arc of a life — not just those already navigating older age. Leith’s willingness to be specific and occasionally irreverent about her own experience makes Being Old a different kind of book, and this promises to be a different kind of conversation about a subject most public discourse still handles with too much care and too little honesty.