Last updated 19:29, Thursday, 31 January 2008

MELVYN BRAGG was born in Carlisle in October 1939. His parents, Mary and Stanley, lived on the new Greenacres estate in Wigton before Stanley took over the Black-a-Moor pub on Market Hill.

Young Melvyn attended Nelson Thomlinson School and was encouraged to sing in choirs, take piano lessons and visit the cinema.

He won a scholarship to study Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford. He joined the BBC in 1961, working in radio before joining the production team of the Monitor arts series on BBC television. From there he joined ITV.

As well as his television work Bragg is also known for his many programmes on Radio 4, including Start the Week, which he presented for 10 years, In Our Time and The Routes of English, a history of the English language.

He has written 19 novels, many of them set in Cumbria, and several non-fiction books.

He was appointed to the House of Lords in 1998 as a Labour life peer; Baron Bragg of Wigton.

Bragg suffered severe depression in his early teens and late twenties and is now president of the mental health charity Mind.

He is married to writer and film-maker Cate Haste. They have two grown-up children.