Few former RIBA Gold Medal winners can have had so varied and successful a career in parallel professional spheres as Lesley Lokko. Not only is she a respected academic and curator, who has founded a string of architectural courses, schools and institutions, but she is also a successful novelist, the author of 12 books for a mass market audience – The Scotsman has described them as “glam lit”.

In any previous era, this might have seemed inconceivable. Architectural academics are of course by necessity writers, but usually of earnest manifestos and theoretical texts. Lokko writes these too, but her fiction writing is unashamedly commercial and – on first appearances – quite distinct from her work as an architectural academic and curator.

But Lokko’s path has been far from conventional and the way she has pursued her life and career is perhaps as much her manifesto as anything that she has actually written. From dropping out of Oxford during the second term of a degree in Hebrew and Arabic, to curating a Venice Biennale that was widely seen as challenging the established narratives around what architecture is, she has made pushing back on conventional expectations her calling card.

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