Wendy Cope is best known to most of us as one of the nation’s best-loved poets, with her sharp eye for human foibles and her wry sense of humour, and also to those of us who remember the late ‘80s as the witty TV critic for The Spectator.

Now, her new book, Life, Love and The Archers, gives us the chance to meet all the many different Wendys there are and have been over the course of her life: the Enid Blyton-obsessed schoolgirl; the ambivalent daughter; the amused teacher; the sensitive journalist; the cynical romantic. In this collection of the best of her prose - recollections, reviews and essays taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work - we get a wonderfully entertaining and unforgettable portrait of one of our most unique writers, and Wendy will be coming to the Chorleywood Literary Festival next week to talk about it.

“This is a new one for me because in the past my books have all been volumes of poetry and I always feel the poems do the work for me at these festivals,” says Wendy, 69. “But reading prose is slightly different, it can be very boring if people just stand up and read a long passage of prose, so I won’t do that! I’ve been practising which bits of the book work at poetry readings over the last few weeks.”

Wendy – whose first poetry collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was released in 1986 when she was 41, to great critical acclaim – was approached by an editor at Two Roads who was “very keen to publish something by me” after having seen some of Wendy’s prose writings in the press. The editor visited Wendy’s archive at the British Library, which it purchased in 2011, and came back with “a load more stuff”, which Wendy and her agent sieved through to find pieces that were suitable.

“There was a lot and it took quite a long time to go through it all,” remembers Wendy, who lives in Ely in Cambridgeshire with her husband, the poet Lachlan Mackinnon. “The most surprising thing was a short story that surfaced that I’d written and then completely forgotten about, as I don’t really write prose fiction.”

The book is a mixture of Wendy’s published articles – she has been a freelance writer and poet since giving up her job as a primary school teacher in London in her 40s – and pieces she wrote “on my own at home and never got round to publishing”, as well as extracts from the autobiography she started writing but then decided she didn’t want to publish.

There are sections on her childhood, on education – her own and her experiences as a teacher – on psychoanalysis, on books, a section including some of her funniest TV columns, and, of course, a section about writing poetry and being a poet.

“I wasn’t particularly keen on poetry as child,” admits Wendy, who only started writing poetry when she was 27. “I read all the time but it wasn’t poetry. I always thought I’d be a writer of stories, so I’m always surprised I’ve ended up being a poet.”

l Life, Love and the Archers – Recollections, Reviews and Other Prose is available now, from Two Roads publishers. Wendy Cope will be appearing at the Chorleywood Literary Festival at Chorleywood Memorial Hall on Saturday, November 15 at 3pm. Details: cwlitfest.org