Originality in science is synonymous with being first; originality in the arts is somewhat different.  At what point do these two creative endeavours overlap?  Ian McEwan is a novelist who has often taken science as a subject: Enduring Love was about a science writer, Saturday about a brain surgeon.  His latest novel, Solar, is about global warming and its protagonist is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has given up original work to enjoy his own celebrity.  McEwan’s first book, the short stories First Love, Last Rites, was hailed for ‘an originality astonishing for a young man still in his twenties’.  Yet original work by scientists is most often achieved while they are still young: do they develop differently?  Richard Fortey’s original work is on fossils.  He is a research palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum whose books include Trilobite!, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and Earth: an intimate history.  A Fellow both of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a former President of the Geological Society of London.

We are grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for sponsoring this talk.