Iris Murdoch artworks from secret room go on display – including self-portrait

Second world war paintings and sketches show novelist ‘engaging with her world in a new light’

For decades, they lay in a secret room in her attic gathering dust. Now, newly discovered artworks by the Booker prize-winning author Iris Murdoch – including the only self-portrait she is known to have painted, four surrealist landscape paintings and three sketches of female nudes – will go on display for the first time on Friday.

The artworks were created at the start of the second world war when Murdoch was a student at Oxford. They expose her early interest in surrealism and fascination with the naked female form.