Sort of a Highlife

A review of a beautifully written new memoir, "Highlife & my other lives", and an interview with its author, Richard Walker

May 23, 2025

The British Council, Richard Walker’s former employer (and mine),1 has worked with many of the best writers from the UK of the last 80 years or so, including AS Byatt, Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift, Caryl Phillips, Jeannette Winterson, and Angela Carter. And sometimes the British Council has itself appeared in novels – for example, in books by Malcolm Bradbury and Olivia Manning.

There’s even a verb associated with the organisation. In his poem Three Poets (2000), Douglas Dunn wrote of his experience: “In Austria – Sorley, Eddie, Liz and me – /British Council-ing…”

But some very fine writers have also worked for the British Council. Examples include Lawrence Durrell, Francis King and Romesh Gunesekera. To which list Richard Walker’s name should certainly be added.

The title for his memoir, Highlife & my other lives, comes from the Ghanaian musical genre, and early on in the book, Richard memorably describes his early encounter with the music:

“With its many guitars and jazzy horns playing driving Akan rhythms, it’s loud and brassy. I love the sound, the mix of melody, tone and pace. Sometimes there are vocals, and I like the pitch and incantation, though I rarely get more than a snatch of the lyrics. It doesn’t matter. Its fusion holds me, captures me in its beat.”

Richard spent part of his childhood in Ghana, a country which he returns to in the epilogue of Highlife. The country was clearly an important influence on his life and is perhaps the origin of some of the beautiful rhythms of his writing.

Richard describes his life with great immediacy and telling detail. Highlife feels like an exemplar of Kierkegaard’s idea of the present continually in motion, as if sitting on a train with one’s back to the direction of travel: the past is to be understood backwards and life is to be lived forward. Richard gives us the “right now” of the journey throughout, along with his efforts to put that life in perspective.2

In between the Ghana episodes, there are vivid snapshots of a life well spent. In one episode, we find Richard smoking hash and taking LSD at a concert attended by 600,000 people on the Isle of Wight in 1970, where Joni Mitchell, The Doors and Miles Davis perform and Jimi Hendrix gives his last performance. Later, there are the lunches with ambassadors and famous writers and artists (William Golding among them), where presumably nothing stronger than vintage port was imbibed.

I found Richard’s descriptions of Ghana, including Highlife music and his sombre visit to Elmina, the former slave trading post, especially striking and memorable.

But the most moving part of the book is the heartfelt account of his wife Lauren’s diagnosis with terminal cancer and the dignity and bravery with which she faced it.

There’s also a brilliant cameo portrait of WH Auden in his later days at Oxford, which contains this remarkable, if unsettling, observation: “Conversing with Auden is like having a conversation with a human-sized lizard turning its head slowly round to meet your gaze.”

As Auden shuffles away in his slippers, Richard imagines the poet, who’d written a fine poem about Edward Lear, softly singing The Owl and the Pussycat to himself on his way back to Christ Church college.

A very different episode is the moment in 1970 when Richard tries to enter Montana from Canada. He’s just discovered the music of the legendary American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, who a new friend describes in this way: “He’s cool. When he sang those songs, he had a sticker on his guitar. It said: ‘This Machine Kills Fascists.’”

But at the border he finds himself talking to an American with rather different views:

“‘Get your bag, sonny,’ says the officer with damp patches under the armpits of his shirt. ‘We can’t let you in,’ he says as I open the rear door to grab my rucksack.
‘But I have a visa.’
‘We don’t care about no visa,’ he says. ‘This photo don’t look nothing like you. We can’t be sure it’s you.’
The photo taken at fourteen bears little resemblance to my eighteen-year-old self. ‘And, anyways, you got long hair. We don’t let in no people with long hair.’
As the barrier is lowered on Montana, I turn round and walk back to Canada.”

This is both a moving and a funny memoir, a vivid portrait of a life spent ricocheting around the globe, partly from choiceand partly at the whim of his then employer.

But contrasting with the randomness of experience are some of the enduring and central themes of the memoir, including Richard’s immense curiosity about the world he finds himself in and, above all, his tender portrait of his marriage to Lauren. Their marriage and their many journeys together did so much to shape his life – and this wonderful book.

I recently spoke to Richard about Highlife & my other lives. You can read the interview below, in which he gives fascinating insights into the writing process.

What motivated you to write a memoir?

"I won't say it was accidental, but I didn't set out to write a memoir originally," Richard explained. After retiring, he travelled to Ghana, wanting to revisit his childhood home. "I wanted to be Richard Walker again, not Mr British Council... I didn't know I was going to write a memoir at that point."

Richard published his first novel, A Curious Child, in 1989. But as the demands of his career grew, the time he could spend on his literary career diminished.

“So I stopped writing. I always said I would write another book, but more than 35 years went by until Highlife came along. After I'd written the first novel, I tried a second one, and I just didn't have time to get it right. So, I stopped writing creatively. I didn't lose my passion for creative writing; I still carried on reading, but I stopped writing. I didn't have the headspace to write. But I said to Lauren, as soon as I retire, my main project is to write another book."

And after retirement, the words came back. "As I started writing, I just found this stuff flowing out of me, and I let it go. And before I knew where I was, I had 20,000 words."

He went on, “As I'm writing it, I'm enjoying it, and it's flowing, but it was all about Ghana, and it was about aspects of my life and memory in Ghana. I thought that might just be a prelude to doing something else, that it would turn into a novella or some short stories. I just thought, don't stop, because you're enjoying it, and it's going well.”

Richard said he’d resisted the idea of writing a memoir. However, a decisive moment came when he shared what he’d written.

“I sent it to a friend who's also a top journalist, who said, ‘it's great, but you're writing a memoir. When did you decide to write a memoir?’ So I accepted that that's what I was going to do.”

Did you have any models in mind?

Walker cites several influences, including Graham Greene’s A sort of life. But there were others: “There was a book called City of Djinns by William Dalrymple about his life in Delhi... then WG Sebald, for me, one of the great writers. I loved his ramble round Suffolk (where I went to boarding school) told in The Rings of Saturn ." He also mentions Deborah Levy's "living autobiographies" and Marina Warner's Inventory of a Life Mislaid as influences during his writing process.

Which were the hardest parts to write?

"It was more difficult to leave out stuff than to write about stuff," Richard said.

He describes having to omit a particularly powerful scene about tragic events that happened to a friend: "I couldn't publish it... even though I think it's a very powerful piece of writing... I didn't feel it was my story to share."

Your use of the present tense brings immediacy to the writing. Was this an early decision?

Richard was encouraged in using the present tense in the way it is used by Deborah Levy. More broadly, it connects with his use of the first-person singular in other works. “I wrote a lot of monologues for radio. I find it easier to write the narrative as an “I”... maybe it relates to the fact that I did a lot of acting and theatre, but if I inhabit someone's mind and their space, I find it easier to write than if it's a he or a she or a they, which is a distancing thing."

And this is how he’d approached his novel, A Curious Child (1989), which will be republished this year.

Can you tell us about the process of writing Highlife?

Highlife has gone through several drafts. "The book is now about 105,000 words," Walker explains, "but when I finished the first major draft, and that was over a five-year period... it was well over 200,000 words."

He emphasises the value of getting others to comment on the text: "I had regular feedback, some of it very detailed, some of it strategic, from a mentor I worked with here in Oxford... and a regular writing group where, at a micro level, individual scenes or slightly longer pieces if people were happy to read things offline."

The process was deliberately methodical and collaborative: "The big decisions, like structural decisions, I took either with the mentor who's seeing it once every two or three months or my new editor."

Richard found the writing group particularly helpful for getting quick reactions, “particularly to key scenes or to things you yourself are struggling with... Or at the other end of the spectrum occasionally, I think I've really nailed it, but it would be nice to have some validation of that."

One of the key structural decisions was related to the section set in Ghana as an adult. He wrote this first, but it appears at the end as the epilogue. This mirrors the prologue, his memories of early life, initially in England, then Ghana.

Highlife is in five “acts”, which makes for seven sections in all with the prologue and the epilogue. It’s a deliberate echo of both Shakespeare's seven stages of man and of the structure of a play.

“I liked the idea of a book in acts rather than chapters. Of course, they bleed into each other, but there's childhood, there's teenage years, there's early adulthood, and then there's the main career and all of that."

How have family and friends reacted?

"My sister, my son, and my daughter are the only three people that really matter in this story, except Lauren, of course, who can no longer comment," Richard says. "I did show the near-final draft to my sister and to my son and daughter, pointing out the bits that featured them. The only change of substance I made was a comment from my daughter (an ex-journalist on The Observer) about the murder of a friend. It was a professional, not a personal, comment relating to ethics.”

How has writing your memoir influenced your perspective on your life?

"I suppose subconsciously, I had two things: I was still mourning, processing Lauren's death, or loss, and I wanted to write a new book," Richard reflected. The writing process helped him recognise something important: "I've lived my life, and to an extent I still do, in a state of joy and enjoyment and sharing and creating."

What do you hope readers will feel after reading Highlife?

"I hope people think it's funny in parts and moving in parts," he said. "It shows, I hope, a life reasonably well led, shows a great relationship. It shows how you can negotiate and live through a very difficult period where someone you love is going to die quite soon."

He emphasises the book's ultimately life-affirming message: "Within all that chaos and horrible stuff going on, there's good things always to be had... Highlife is the energy to enjoy life but also to take the great things and not dwell on the things that are inevitable."

Richard spoke of what he learned from his late wife, Lauren. He quoted something she said near the end of her life when they were enjoying a moment of pastoral beauty in the English countryside:

If I could die right now, here with you, I'd be happy.

He added, “You know, that's a complete moment... So there's beauty in death as well. I hope people get some sense of [how] you can enjoy much of your day, within the day, and then within the week, and then within the year... try and celebrate all the great things in life.”

Listening to this, I suggested readers would find the book instructive, but Richard demurred. “I think I'd prefer the word ‘uplifting’.”

Highlife was published on 22 May 2025 by Amaurea Press.

Richard Walker spent part of his childhood in Ghana, read English at Oxford, and worked in Canada, Spain and Kuwait, before joining the British Council. Most of his subsequent professional life was spent travelling the world as a senior Director for the organisation. It brought him postings in Bangkok, New Delhi, Sao Paolo, Lagos, Cyprus, Athens, Brussels and Hong Kong. Now he divides his time between his home in Oxford, and the house and garden he and Lauren created by a Venetian town in the Peloponnese. Several of his stories and plays have been broadcast by the BBC, and in 1989 he published his first novel, A Curious Child. Innovative for being written from the perspective of a transgender person, this is also being republished by Amaurea Press in 2025.

Richard and I worked together for a time at the British Council head office and were destined to become friends through a shared interest in books and writing.

I borrowed the image of Kierkegaard travelling backwards on a train from Clare Carlisle’s excellent book on the great Danish thinker, Philosopher of the Heart.