I owe Tom Stoppard a debt measured in time.

News of his death sent me back to one afternoon in the London Library. There’s no need to stand at a church pulpit and fake a sermon about him; his work has already preached to half the world. All I really have to offer is that small, specific memory.

I met him there, in that strange, generous maze of shelves where you can lose hours and find entire lives. I was younger, not especially sure of my place among the serious readers and serious writers who moved through those narrow stacks as if they had always belonged there. He, on the other hand, was unmistakably himself: already part of the canon that lined the walls.

What stays with me is not a clever remark or a famous line, but the simplest thing: he gave me his time.

He didn’t need to. He had nothing to gain from a conversation with me. But when I approached him – hesitant, aware of the absurdity of interrupting a man whose work people write theses about – he closed the gap between stranger and encounter with one small gesture: he stopped what he was doing, turned fully towards me, and listened.

It wasn’t a grand mentoring session. There were no declarations, no “remember this, young man” moment. Instead, he did something rarer: he treated my questions as if they were worth answering. He spoke about craft and doubt and the long, unglamorous business of getting words right. Not as a performance, not as a lecture, but as one writer talking to another, even though only one of us had earned that title.

For those few minutes in the London Library, he behaved as if there was nowhere else he needed to be.

I remember his attention most of all. Undivided. You realise how starved we are of that when you suddenly encounter the real thing. In a world of half-conversations and people looking over your shoulder for someone more important, he did the opposite.

The effect was wildly disproportionate to the length of the encounter. A brief slice of his afternoon translated into years of permission for me: permission to take writing seriously, to keep going when the rest of life was pushing in other directions, to believe the work mattered enough to fight for space in which to do it.

People speak of Stoppard’s brilliance – the language that crackles, the ideas stacked like mirrors, the blend of intellect and feeling. All of that is true and well documented. What I want to pay tribute to is something smaller and, in its way, just as important: his basic decency. The way a man whose name sits comfortably on the spine of world theatre still had time for an unknown in a quiet London room.

It’s easy to talk about “supporting emerging writers” in the abstract. Institutions and organisations put it into mission statements. What Tom Stoppard did that day was the concrete version. He looked up. He listened. He made space. There was no audience, no camera, no official mentorship scheme. Just a conversation he could easily have brushed off and didn’t.

That generosity has stayed with me longer than any passing bit of praise or literary prize ever could. It set a standard: if he could make time, then so can the rest of us. When a younger writer reaches out, when someone is hovering at the edge of the room unsure whether they belong, I remember that moment in the London Library and try, in a small way, to pass it on.

So this is my homage: not a scholarly essay on his plays, not a list of favourite lines, but a simple thank you to Tom Stoppard for the most valuable thing any writer can give another – an honest slice of their time, freely offered, at the beginning, when it’s needed most.