How to Age: School of Life

Anne Karpf is a writer, medical sociologist and award-winning journalist. She has been a contributing editor to Cosmopolitan, and wrote a weekly column for the family pages of the Guardian, to which she now contributes columns on social, political and cultural issues. She also writes for the Independent on Sunday and other publications. A regular broadcaster, she writes and presents for BBC Radio 4, and is the author of three books, including The Human Voice (Bloomsbury, 2007). She is Reader in Writing and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University. Anne Karpf won the 2014 Older People in the Media award for best individual voice for How to Age and her Guardian journalism on older people's issues.

Society has a deep fear of ageing. Old age is increasingly viewed as a biomedical problem, something to be avoided at all costs and then vanished away by medicine. Anne Karpf urges us to change our narrative.

Exploring how our outlook on ageing is historically determined and culturally defined, she draws upon case studies, old and new, to suggest how ageing can be an actively enriching time of immense growth. She argues that if we can recognize growing older as an inevitable part of the human condition, then the great challenge of ageing turns out to be none other than the challenge of living. One in the new series of books from The School of Life, launched January 2014: How to Age by Anne Karpf How to Develop Emotional Health by Oliver James How to Be Alone by Sara Maitland How to Deal with Adversity by Christopher Hamilton How to Think About Exercise by Damon Young How to Connect with Nature by Tristan Gooley