Joanna Trollope: 'You cannot be great novelist until after 35' By Hannah Furness

Best-selling author claims writers will only create best works after age of 35 when life has 'knocked them about a bit' as she warns would-be writers not to be 'in a hurry'.

It is often said that with age comes wisdom, patience and a better fine wine. Now, it seems there could be one other thing to look forward to: a best-selling novel.

Joanna Trollope, the author, has claimed writers will only create their best works after the age of 35, when life has "knocked them about a bit".

Saying she did not mean her words to sound "unkind" to the younger generation, she warned would-be writers not to be "in a hurry" to get published.

Trollope, 71, said she always advised young authors they would produce much better work after their 35th birthday than before, when they have experience both pain and joy.

The pronouncement may come as a surprise to the likes of Eleanor Catton, who won the Man Booker Prize aged just 28 in 2013 for The Luminaries.

It could also raise eyebrows among fans of Charles Dickens, who wrote Pickwick Papers when he was 26, William Shakespeare, who is believed to have drafted his first play around the age of 25, and Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein at 20.

Speaking at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai, Trollope said the public learned "an enormous amount" from good fiction, which feeds into all literature.

"But I think in order to write good fiction, I think you need to have got a lot of living under your belt," she said. "And that includes the pain as well as the joy.

"It's a rather unkind thing to have to say, and I don't mean it unkindly, but I always say to people you will write much better fiction after the age of 35 than before. Merely because life will have knocked you about a bit by then.

"I don't mean it unlikely, I only mean it in terms of don't be in a hurry."

She added it was essential for writers to grow to understand other people and their motivations, saying she had spent years observing everyone around her.

"And you have to be in tune with other people; you have to understand that the suffering of other people is not negligible than even if you think they're making the most enormous fuss," she told an audience.

"What I try to do is get inside head after head after head."

Her point is echoed by the success of some of Britain's best-loved authors, including Alexander McCall Smith who published his first book at age 50, and Richard Adams who wrote Watership Down at 53.

Other authors, however, appear to be the exception that prove the rule.

Some, such as Jack Kerouac and F Scott Fitzgerald, were precociously young when they wrote their first novels in their early 20s, while others sneak in just before their 35th birthdays:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, for example, was published when J K Rowling was 32.

Trollope appeared at the festival to speak about her latest novel, Balancing Act, which features a family trying to navigate the complicated generational divide between work, children and gender equality.

She has also recently written a modern version of Sense and Sensibility, setting it in the 21st century as part of the Jane Austen Project.

Of her work on the project, she said: "I started it as a fan and finished it thinking she was an absolute genius.

"How did she know, out of some unbelievable instinct, that romantic love, class and money were going to be the stuff of fiction forever?"