Maggie Hartford on a food writer who helped to transform our post-war diet

Few people who were alive in the 1970s can forget Vesta curry and the arrival of Indian takeaways. But if one person was responsible for awakening us to the possibilities of Indian food, it was Madhur Jaffrey.

She is in Oxford next week for the Oxford Literary Festival and her 80th birthday celebration at University College is already sold out.

There is still a chance to catch her at the Sheldonian Theatre on Monday. At The Magic of India, sponsored by The Oxford Times, she will be joined by former BBC broadcaster Sir Mark Tully.

They will evoke the sounds, smells and moods of India from the last days of the Raj to the present day, and look at what the future holds.

Jaffrey was born in Delhi but only learned to cook at 20, when she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She found our food so terrible that she wrote to her mother asking for cooking instructions. Her acting career included Shakespeare Wallah, and after moving to New York she became a food writer to supplement her film income. Her Invitation To Indian Cookery, published in 1973, was a revelation to Baby Boomers, opening up a world away from curry powder. A BBC TV series, Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery, made her a household name.

Her book Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India ends when she was in her teens, at a time when Indian-born Tully was begining his 30-year stint as BBC India correspondent.

The Oxford Times is also sponsoring a talk by bestselling thriller writer Robert Harris, who lives in Berkshire. He will be talking to FT business columnist and novelist John Gapper about his latest novel, An Officer and a Spy, set during the Dreyfus affair in late 19th-century France.

Harris specialises in fictionalising key events in history. Fatherland imagined events following Germany’s victory in the Second World War, while Enigma portrayed the breaking of the Nazi code at Bletchley Park. His latest novel continues the spy theme, with Army officer Georges Picquart witnessing Capt Alfred Dreyfus being publicly humiliated. He is promoted to the intelligence unit that tracked down Dreyfus but begins to realise the corruption at the heart of it.

The third event sponsored by The Oxford Times features young adult author Malorie Blackman, creator of the Noughts and Crosses series, discussing human rights in children’s books with Shami Chakrabarti, Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and director of Liberty, in a session for ages 12 plus.