Prue Leith is largely known in South Africa as the founder patron of the Prue Leith Chefs Academy, the daughter of the once famous actress Margaret Inglis, or the Johannesburg girl made good who made her name in London as a restauraneur, television cook and writer.

Prue says that she learnt to eat as a student in Paris, learnt to cook in London, and opted for the kitchen because she did not want to work in an office. Then she fell in love with business and enterprise, and ended up running the Leith's group of companies (School of Food and Wine, Leith's Events and Parties and Leith's Restaurants) from an office. When she sold the business in 1993 she employed 500 people, her flagship restaurant had a Michelin star and Prue had won the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year award, and been honored by the Queen with an O.B.E.

Prue is endlessly energetic. "I'm one of those irritating women who want to fix the world. I cannot help getting stuck in and organising things," she says. Indeed in her time she has chaired the Royal Society of Arts, founded half a dozen charities (mostly to do with education, the arts or food), chaired the Board of Governors of a not-for-profit education company that turns around failing schools, and is the current Chair of the School Food Trust, set up by the British Government to change the diet of the nation through teaching children at school about food and persuading them to eat healthily.

Prue used to write cookbooks. Indeed her best selling Leith's Cookery Bible, written with Caroline Waldegrave, has been in print for 18 years and is still a best seller. Now Prue writes novels. Her fourth and latest, Choral Society, comes out in South Africa in September, when she will tour the country publicizing it. It is a tale of three women who, like Prue, are facing ageing and retirement but refuse to sit in the corner and knit. "It was hell to write" she says, "It's three stories really, but interwoven and interdependent. A logistical nightmare, but in the end I think I got it to work." Leaving Patrick was about the restaurant business, Sisters is largely set in South Africa, mostly in the bush, and The Gardener is set in Prue's home county of Oxfordshire in the Cotswolds. All her novels have a lot of cooking and eating in them. "I like writing about food. Especially when I'm hungry," she says.

They also have, it must be said, a fair bit of sex in them. "Yes" she admits, "but not toe-curlingly embarrassing sex, I hope. They are love stories, after all, and modern ones."

When she is not writing novels or worrying about school food, she might be jet setting about the world for Orient Express Hotels (she's on the Board, which makes her a Director of the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, the Westcliff in Johannesburg and a clutch of top game camps in Botswana, plus forty-odd famous hotels and luxury trains from Peru to the Far East. Or she might be filming for a new series of The Great British Menu, a hugely successful show that has now been going for four years.