Tracey Emin on becoming a dame and getting cancer all-clear

We meet in the studio at her imposing central London home in a Georgian square in Bloomsbury.

We’re surrounded by her paintings, some propped up on stools. The drips of white, red and blue paint on the parquet floor below them are evidence of Emin’s style.

“I’m quite aggressive with the paint and my movements and my strokes and everything,” she says.

The damehood, revealed in the King’s Birthday Honours on Friday, was entirely unexpected, she says.

She had already been appointed CBE in 2012, but “Dame Tracey”, she laughs, “has a ring about it”.

“It’s really cool,” she says. “I don’t think there’s ever been one before.”

She might not have become Dame Tracey if she hadn’t been alerted to a letter marked “urgent” sitting unopened at her former studio.

She tells us she spent a day at a Buckingham Palace garden party, where she found herself shaking hands with the King and Queen.

“I was thinking, this is a bit weird. I’m kind of up the top here. I wonder why.”

It was only on her way home that she received the call about the letter. I get the feeling she hasn’t stopped smiling since.