St Andrew's Book Festival, London reviews: Judy Murray | Andrew O'Hagan

Du Beke had written his own novel, a behind-the-scenes look at ballroom dancing, and asked Murray for her comments, “which were quite extensive because I’m a big grammar geek”. He suggested that she should follow up her memoir with a novel similar to his, only set in the world of tennis.

People have long ago seen through the “pushy mum” label the tabloids affixed to Murray early on, when Andy was a wild card 18-year-old catapulted into Centre Court celebrity. Thursday night’s audience at St Columba’s Church in Knightsbridge could certainly also see her charm and humour, and maybe even realise just how vulnerable she must have felt, picked out by the BBC TV cameras and filmed in slow motion, or photographed from vans with blackened windows for tabloid stories or just having to read Boris Becker’s Daily Express piece urging Andy to ditch her as coach.

And they saw something else too: that behind the tenacity that was an absolute requirement in a country where the sport had no infrastructure, support or funding and 195 rainy days a year, a good coach also needs immense people skills - as Andy Murray will now have to demonstrate while working with Novak Djokovic.

“They’ve been friends since they were 11,” she points out, “and know each other inside and out. It’s a great opportunity for Andy - and Novak will have someone he knows well and trusts”. And his now non-tennis-playing mother? There’ll be another novel, she revealed. This time there’ll be a murder in the tennis club. Ian Rankin, you have been warned.

Andrew O’Hagan had news of his own: a Hollywood deal for a feature film based on his 45,000-word article for the London Review of Books on the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic founder of Bitcoin. As it’s still less than two years since the acclaimed TV adaptation of his novel Mayflies, and less than one since Will Smith (Slow Horses, Veep etc) began work on turning his state-of-the-nation novel Caledonian Road into a TV series, it’s hard to think of a contemporary Scottish writer with more cultural clout.

Or, come to that, more self-assurance. “I’ve never felt undeserving in my life,” O’Hagan said, adding that this wasn’t arrogance but self-belief. Perhaps because of this, he has no time for the notion that writers should concentrate on what they know. “I think writing outside your experience is your job,” he said, outlining some of the stranger milieux he researched as part of his book, from black gangs to Russian oligarchs.

The weirdest moment, he said, was when he found himself in the royal enclosure at a polo match at Windsor watching the late Queen talking to a boring 24-year-old Japanese pop star. “There are some things,” he said, “that a novelist just can’t make up.”