“THE end of your novel moved me to tears,” I confessed to the well-known author. Baron Bragg of Wigton, better known as plain Melvyn, the face of ITV’s South Bank Show, chuckled appreciatively and replied: “I hope you put that in the Oxford Mail.”

I was talking to the arts presenter about his 20th novel, Remember Me..., which is partly set in Oxford.

Lord Bragg, who is nearing 70, finished writing the novel a year ago, and it is now out in paperback.

But concluding the story has had a disturbing effect on the cultural icon.

After working on fiction almost every day for the past five decades, he finished Remember Me... and has hardly been able to put pen to paper since.

It’s perhaps not surprising that working on the 550-page novel had such a profound effect on the Cumbrian-born writer.

Although it's a work of fiction, it features autobiographical elements in the tradition of DH Lawrence, or American writers Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. They drew heavily on their own lives for inspiration and Lord Bragg has certainly adopted the technique in Remember Me ...

The plot – students Joe and Natasha meet at Oxford University, fall for each other and then enjoy a loving but ultimately broken marriage – broadly relects the author's own life story.

His first wife, Lisa Roche, took her own life when she was in her mid-30s, after she had given birth to their daughter.

Did revisiting this dark chapter in his own past make him feel any better, decades on from the tragedy?, I asked.

“No, I felt rather worse after writing it, Lord Bragg told The Guide.

“I had found all sorts of ways of forgetting the past. I blocked it out in lots of different ways – by working, having another family, by getting older.

“Layer goes on layer and you store it away. My daughter supported me in writing this novel and so did my (second) wife. My daughter was very pleased that I had addressed the subject, while my wife said ‘it’s fiction, there it is’.

“The story is cast as an exercise or investigation of memory as well as an autobiographical novel. I'm fiddling around with a few pages of something at the moment, but I haven't really written any fiction since I finished the novel."

A Wadham College history student in the late 1950s, the broadcaster – who is also familiar to many Radio 4 listeners – is a Fellow of Wadham and St Catherine's colleges in Oxford and knows the city very well.

Plenty of well-known university landmarks crop up in the first section of the novel, including the Randolph Hotel, and art student Natasha, Joe’s French girlfriend, gets a complimentary review in the Oxford Mail when Joe stages an exhibition for her.

Lord Bragg is returning to Oxford on Friday, March 27, in his role as president for the mental health charity Mind, when he will give a talk at the Taylor Institution in St Giles on his autobiographical fiction, at 5.30pm. Tickets cost £5.

The writer will discuss the critically-acclaimed The Soldier's Return trilogy, and Remember Me..., which is published by Sceptre, price £7.99.

His fans will be hoping that his 20th novel does not turn out to be his last.