Frsl

A. N. Wilson
Andrew Norman Wilson (born 27 October 1950) is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and former columnist for the London Evening Standard, and has been an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.
Wilson was educated at Rugby School and New College, Oxford. Destined originally for ordination in the Church of England, Wilson entered St Stephen's House, the High Church theological hall at Oxford, but left at the end of his first year.
In 1971 he married the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones. They had two daughters and divorced in 1990.
In the late 1980s he publicly stated that he was an atheist and published a pamphlet Against Religion in the Chatto & Windus CounterBlasts series; however, religious and ecclesiological themes continue to inform his work. For nearly 30 years he continued to be both a sceptic, and a prominent atheist.

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A. S. Byatt
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, known as A. S. Byatt (/ˈbaɪ.ət/BY-ət; born 24 August 1936, Sheffield) is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Byatt was born as Antonia Susan Drabble, the daughter of John Drabble, QC, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Byatt was educated at two independent schools, Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School, and noted in an interview in 2009 "I am not a Quaker, of course, because I'm anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful – you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things." She went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford. Sister to novelist Margaret Drabble and art historian Helen Langdon, Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962–71), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.

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Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 1948 in Zanzibar) is a Tanzanian novelist based in the United Kingdom.
From 1980 to 1982, Gurnah lectured at the Bayero University Kano in Nigeria. He then moved to the University of Kent, where he earned his PhD in 1982. He is now a lecturer there.
The most famous of these are Paradise, Desertion and By the Sea, the first of which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize. By the Sea, meanwhile, was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

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Adam Fergusson (MEP)
Adam Dugdale Fergusson (born 10 July 1932) is a British journalist, author and Conservative Party politician who served one term in the European Parliament (MEP). He has remained involved in the field of European Union affairs since, as a Special Adviser to Conservative governments and as a business consultant. Among other books, he wrote When Money Dies, a classic account of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic. It deals with not only the economic impacts that hyperinflation had upon society in the Weimar Republic, but also the way that society itself changed. Societal norms were broken down in the wake of hyperinflation, and Fergusson approaches this topic. First published in 1975, When Money Dies was hailed as a cult classic in the wake of the Financial crisis of 2007-2010, with copies changing hands on eBay for up to $1000. As a result, When Money Dies was republished in July 2010, becoming an internet sensation after allegedly being commended by financier, Warren Buffett.
Fergusson is the second son of Sir James Fergusson, 8th Bt. of Kilkerran and the younger brother of Sir Charles Fergusson, the present 9th Bt. of Kilkerran. His sister, Alice, is married to Baron Renton of Mount Harry. He attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge where he read History, graduating in 1955. He went into journalism on the Glasgow Herald, working as a Leader-writer in 1957-58 and as Diplomatic Correspondent from 1959 to 1961.

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Adam Foulds
Adam Foulds (/ˈfoʊldz/ FOHLDZ; born 1974) is a British novelist and poet.
Foulds was educated at Bancroft's School, read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford under Craig Raine, and graduated with an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in 2001.
In 2007, Foulds published his first book, The Truth About These Strange Times. The novel, which is set in the present day, is concerned in part with the World Memory Championships.
In 2008, Foulds published a substantial narrative poem entitled The Broken Word, described by the critic Peter Kemp as a "verse novella". It is a fictional version of some events during the Mau Mau Uprising. Writing in The Guardian, David Wheatley suggested that "The Broken Word is a moving and pitiless depiction of the world as it is rather than as we might like it to be, and the terrible things we do to defend our place in it".
In 2009, his novel The Quickening Maze was published. Recommending the work in a 'books of the year' survey, novelist Julian Barnes declared: 'Having last year greatly admired Adam Foulds's long poem "The Broken Word", I uncharitably wondered whether his novel The Quickening Maze (Cape) might allow me to tacitly advise him to stick to verse. Some hope: this story of the Victorian lunatic asylum where the poet John Clare and Tennyson's brother Septimus were incarcerated is the real thing. It's not a "poetic novel" either, but a novelistic novel, rich in its understanding and representation of the mad, the sane, and that large overlapping category in between'.

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Adam Mars-Jones
Adam Mars-Jones (born 26 October 1954) is a British novelist and critic.
Mars-Jones was born in London, to parents William Mars-Jones, the Welsh High Court judge and President of the London Welsh Trust, and Sheila (née Cobon). Mars-Jones studied at Westminster School, and read Classics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, and BBC Television's Newsnight Review.
His first collection of stories, Lantern Lecture (1981), won a Somerset Maugham Award. Other works include Monopolies of Loss (1992) and The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (1987), which was co-written with Edmund White. His first novel, The Waters of Thirst, was published in 1993. Blind Bitter Happiness (1997), a collection of essays, includes 'Venus Envy', which was originally published in the CounterBlasts series in 1990. Pilcrow (2008) was his second novel, followed by Cedilla in 2011. These two works form the first two parts of a projected trilogy.

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Adam Nicolson
Adam Nicolson, 5th Baron Carnock, FRSL, FSA (born 12 September 1957), is a British author who writes about English history, landscape and the sea.
He is noted for his books Sea Room (about the Shiant Isles, a group of uninhabited islands in the Hebrides); Power and Glory: the making of the King James Bible; Men of Honour (about Admiral Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar); Earls of Paradise (an exploration of Arcadianism in 16th and 17th century England); The Smell of Summer Grass (describing his struggles with a small Sussex farm); and Sissinghurst: an Unfinished History (describing his attachment to his family home and his plans to transform the landscape there). In 2011 he published The Gentry: Stories of the English (about the last six centuries of gentry culture in England).
Adam Nicolson is the son of writer Nigel Nicolson and grandson of the writers Vita Sackville-West and Sir Harold Nicolson. He was educated at Summer Fields School,Eton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has worked as a journalist and columnist on the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

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Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif (Arabic: أهداف سويف‎) (born March 23, 1950) is an Egyptian novelist and political and cultural commentator.
Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England. She studied for a PhD in linguistics at the University of Lancaster. ‎ Her debut novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1993), set in Egypt and England, recounts the maturing of Asya, a beautiful Egyptian who, by her own admission, "feels more comfortable with art than with life." Her second novel The Map of Love (1999) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has been translated into 21 languages and sold over a million copies.^{[citation needed]} She has also published two works of short stories, Aisha (1983) and Sandpiper(1996) - a selection from which was combined in the collection I Think Of You in 2007, and Stories Of Ourselves in 2010.
Soueif writes primarily in English, but her Arabic-speaking readers say they can hear the Arabic through the English.^{[citation needed]} She translated Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (with a foreword by Edward Said) from Arabic into English.

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Aidan Chambers
Aidan Chambers (born 27 December 1934) is an award-winning British writer of novels for children and young adults.
Born near Chester-le-Street, County Durham in 1934, Chambers was an only child, and a poor scholar; considered "slow" by his teachers, he did not learn to read fluently until the age of nine. After two years in the Royal Navy as part of his National Service, Chambers trained as a teacher and taught for three years at Westcliff High School in Southend on Sea before joining an Anglican monastery in Stroud, Gloucestershire in 1960. He later used his experience as a monk in his novel Now I Know.
His first plays, including Johnny Salter (1966), The Car and The Chicken Run (1968), were published while he was a teacher at Archway School in Stroud.
Chambers left the monastery in 1967 and a year later became a freelance writer. His works include the "Dance sequence" of six novels: Breaktime, Dance on My Grave, Now I Know, The Toll Bridge, Postcards from No Man's Land which won the 1999 Carnegie Medal and This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn. He and his wife, Nancy, founded Thimble Press and the magazine Signal to promote literature for children and young adults. They were awarded the Eleanor Farjeon Award for outstanding services to children's books in 1982. From 2003 to 2006 he was President of the School Library Association.

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Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton, FRSL (born Zurich, 20 December 1969) is a Swiss writer, philosopher, television presenter and entrepreneur, resident in the United Kingdom. His books and television programmes discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. At 23, he published Essays In Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004) and The Architecture Of Happiness (2006). In August 2008, he was a founding member of a new educational establishment in central London called The School of Life. In May 2009, he was a founding member of a new architectural organization called "Living Architecture". In October that year, de Botton was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in recognition of his services to architecture. In 2011, de Botton was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).
Born in Zurich, de Botton comes from a Sephardic Jewish family, originating from a small Castilian town of Boton (now vanished) on the Iberian peninsula. His ancestors include Abraham de Boton. His paternal grandmother was Yolande Harmer. His father, Gilbert de Botton, was the co-founder of Global Asset Management. His wealth was estimated by one source to be £234 million in 1999. He has one sister Miel and they received a secular upbringing. De Botton spent the first twelve years of his life in Switzerland where he was brought up to speak French and German.

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Alan Ayckbourn
Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE (born 12 April 1939) is a prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.
Major successes include Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975), Just Between Ourselves (1976), A Chorus of Disapproval (1984), Woman in Mind (1985), A Small Family Business (1987), Man Of The Moment (1988), House & Garden (1999) and Private Fears in Public Places (2004). His plays have won numerous awards, including seven London Evening Standard Awards. They have been translated into over 35 languages and are performed on stage and television throughout the world. Ten of his plays have been staged on Broadway, attracting two Tony nominations, and one Tony award.

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Alan Brownjohn
Alan Charles Brownjohn FRSL (born 28 July 1931) is an English poet and novelist.
He was born in London and educated at Merton College, Oxford. He taught until 1979, when he became a full-time writer. He participated in Philip Hobsbaum's weekly poetry discussion meetings known as The Group.
Alan Brownjohn is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

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Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst FRSL (born 26 May 1954) is a British novelist, and winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.
Hollinghurst was born on 26 May 1954 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the only child of James Hollinghurst, a bank manager, and his wife, Elizabeth.^{[citation needed]} He attended Canford School in Dorset.
Hollinghurst read English at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1972 to 1979, graduating with a BA in 1975, and a MLitt in 1979. His thesis was on the works of Ronald Firbank, E. M. Forster and L. P. Hartley, three gay writers. While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, a year before Motion.
In the late 1970s he became a lecturer at Magdalen College, and then at Somerville College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1981 he moved on to lecture at University College London, and in 1982 he joined The Times Literary Supplement, where he was the paper's deputy editor from 1985 to 1990.
Hollinghurst is gay. He lives in London.

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Alan Jenkins (poet)
Alan Jenkins (b. 1955 Kingston upon Thames, Surrey) is a British poet.
He was brought up on the outskirts of London in Richmond, and educated at the University of Sussex, and has worked for the Times Literary Supplement since 1981, first as poetry and fiction editor, and then as deputy editor. He was also a poetry critic for The Observer, and the Sunday Independent from 1985-1990. He has edited the "Collected Poems of Ian Hamilton" (Faber&Faber, 2009).
He has taught creative writing for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Arvon Foundation, the Poetry Society, London, and at the American University in Paris. He was a judge for the Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes.
He lives in London.
One sometimes thinks that the personal past, those childhood reveries and glints of sunlight on far-off summer lawns that FR Leavis so detested in the work of Edith Sitwell, is about all the modern English poet has left - that, and a fatal habit of parading his influences to the point where what gets written is often only a variation on an existing text. To suggest that the dominant note of Alan Jenkins's new collection is elegiac is not, in the end, to say a great deal, either about his poems, Jenkins himself or even his development as a writer. In the Hot-house (1988), his first outing - this is the fifth - came crammed with exactly the same kind of aching reminiscence: maternal shadows in the Eden-era nursery, the "flushed, unfussed, unreluctant, dapper" figure of Jenkins senior, the rueful acknowledgment of influence, the sail-boat nosing along a pre-lapsarian Thames. All these - taken out, dusted down and re-examined - contribute something to A Shorter Life's prevailing air of lamp-eyed brooding.

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Alan Judd
Alan Judd aka Alan Petty (born in 1946) is a former soldier and diplomat who now works as a security analyst and writer in the United Kingdom. He writes both books and articles, regularly contributing to a number of publications, including The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. His books include both fiction and non-fiction titles, with his novels often drawing on his military background.
In 1991, he won the Guardian Fiction Award for his book The Devil's Own Work.

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Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980), A History of Reading (1996), The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008); and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991). Though almost all of Manguel's books were written in English, two of his novels (El regreso and Todos los hombres son mentirosos) were written in Spanish and have not yet been published in English. Manguel has also written film criticism such as Bride of Frankenstein (1997) and collections of essays such as Into the Looking Glass Wood (1998).
For over twenty years, Manguel has edited a number of literary anthologies on a variety of themes or genres ranging from erotica and gay stories to fantastic literature and mysteries.
Manguel grew up in Israel, where his father was the Argentine ambassador. Later, in Buenos Aires, when Manguel was still a teenager, he met the writer Jorge Luis Borges, a customer of the Pygmalion Anglo-German bookshop in Buenos Aires where Manguel worked after school. As Borges was almost blind, he would ask others to read out loud for him, and Manguel became one of Borges' readers, several times a week from 1964 to 1968.

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Ali Smith
Ali Smith (born 1962 in Inverness) is a British writer.
She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that was never finished. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with CFS/ME. Following this she became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement. Openly gay, she lives in Cambridge with her partner Sarah Wood.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
In 2009, she donated the short story Last (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Fire' collection.

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Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munro (née Laidlaw; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short-story writer, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. Generally regarded as one of the world's foremost writers of fiction, Munro writes about the human condition and relationships seen through the lens of daily life. While the locus of Munro’s fiction is her native Southwestern Ontario, her reputation as a short-story writer is international. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."
Munro was born in the town of Wingham, Ontario, into a family of fox and poultry farmers. Her father was Robert Eric Laidlaw and her mother, a schoolteacher, was Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney). She began writing as a teenager and published her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," in 1950 while a student at the University of Western Ontario. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry James Munro and move to Vancouver, British Columbia. Her daughters Sheila, Catherine, and Jenny were born in 1953, 1955, and 1957 respectively; Catherine died 15 hours after birth. In 1963, the Munros moved to Victoria where they opened Munro's Books, a popular bookstore still in business. In 1966, their daughter Andrea was born. Alice and James Munro were divorced in 1972. She returned to Ontario to become Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario. In 1976 she married Gerald Fremlin, a geographer. The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario. They have since moved from the farm to a house in the town of Clinton.

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Allan Massie
Allan Massie (born 1938) is a Scottish journalist, columnist, sports writer and novelist.
Born in 1938 in Singapore, where his father was a rubber planter for Sime Darby, Massie spent his childhood in Aberdeenshire. He was educated at the private schools Drumtochty Castle preparatory school and Glenalmond College in Perthshire before going on to attend Trinity College, Cambridge where he read history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has lived in the Scottish Borders for the last 25 years, and now lives in Selkirk. He has just published The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain.
Massie is one of Scotland's most prolific and well-known journalists, writing regular columns for The Scotsman, The Sunday Times (Scotland) and the Scottish Daily Mail. He has been The Scotsman's chief fiction reviewer for a quarter of a century and also regularly writes about rugby union and cricket for that paper. He has previously been a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, the Glasgow Herald, and was the Sunday Standard's television critic during that paper's brief existence. He is also a contributor to The Spectator - where he writes a weekly column, Life and Letters - the Literary Review and The Independent. He has also written for the New York Review of Books.

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Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri (born 1962 Calcutta) is an internationally recognized Indian English author and academic. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.
Amit Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay. He has written numerous novels, short stories, poems and critical essays in English. He attended University College London, Balliol College, Oxford and has also been Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College. He was Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge University, a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.
His novels have won several major awards and he has received international critical acclaim. His latest book is The Immortals, a novel about music in the modern world. 2008 saw the publication of Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture, bringing together his major work as a critic. A collection of poems entitled St. Cyril Road and Other Poems appeared in 2005, and in 2001 he edited the influential The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. His study of D.H. Lawrence's poetry, D.H. Lawrence and 'Difference': Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, was called 'truly groundbreaking' by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. His work appeared in The Guardian.

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Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh (Bengali: অমিতাভ ঘোষ, born July 11, 1956), is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in the English language.
Ghosh was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army, and was educated at The Doon School; St. Stephen's College, Delhi; Delhi University; India; and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was awarded a D. Phil. in social anthropology. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi.
Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. They have two children, Lila and Nayan. He has been a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York, as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature. He has also been a visiting professor to the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Ghosh subsequently returned to India and published his Ibis Trilogy, of which two volumes have been published to date, Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke.

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Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy (born 1956) is a British author, born in London to Jamaican parents who sailed to England on the Empire Windrush in 1948.
Levy is of primarily Afro-Jamaican descent. Levy has a Jewish paternal grandfather and a Scots maternal great-grandfather.
In her mid-twenties she did work for a social institution that included dealing with racist attacks. She also worked part-time in the BBC costume department, while starting a graphic design company with her husband Bill Mayblin. During this time she experienced a form of awakening to her identity concerning both her gender and her race. She also became aware of the power of books and began to read “excessively”: it was easy enough to find literature by black writers from the United States, but she could find very little literature from black writers in the United Kingdom.^{[citation needed]}
Levy began writing only in her mid-thirties, but she attracted attention immediately with her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin'. Her fourth novel, Small Island (2004), won three prestigious awards: Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It has since been made into a television drama, which was broadcast by the BBC in December 2009. Her fifth novel, The Long Song, won the 2011 Walter Scott Prize and was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

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Andrew Lycett
Andrew Lycett is an English biographer and journalist.
He was educated at Charterhouse School and studied history at Christ Church, Oxford University. He then worked for a while for The Times as a correspondent in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. He has written a number of well-received biographies; he is best known for his biography of Ian Fleming, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
He currently lives and writes in London.

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Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.
Motion was born on 26 October 1952 in London; his mother was Catherine Gillian Bakewell (known as Gillian) and his father Andrew Richard Michael Motion (known as Richard). The family moved to Stisted, near Braintree in Essex, when Motion was 12 years old. Motion went to boarding school from the age of seven joined by his younger brother. Most of the boy's friends were from the school and when Motion was in the village he spent a lot of time on his own. He began to have an interest and affection for the countryside and he went for walks with a pet dog. Later he went to Radley College, where, in the sixth form, he encountered Mr Peter Way, an inspiring English teacher who introduced him to poetry – first Hardy, then Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Heaney, Hughes, Wordsworth and Keats.
When Motion was 17 years old, his mother had a horse riding accident and suffered a serious head injury requiring a life-saving neurosurgery operation. She regained some speech, but she was severely paralysed and remained in and out of coma for nine years. She died in 1978 and her husband died of cancer in 2006. Motion has said that he wrote to keep his memory of his mother alive and she was a muse of his work. When Motion was about 18 years old he moved away from the village to study English at University College, Oxford; however, since then he has remained in contact with the village to visit the church graveyard, where his parents are buried, and also to see his brother, who lives nearby. At University he studied at weekly sessions with W. H. Auden, who he greatly admired." Motion won the university's Newdigate Prize and graduated with a first class honours degree.

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Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan, FRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. He is also an Editor at Large of Esquire and is currently a creative writing fellow at King's College London. He was selected by the literary magazine Granta for inclusion in their 2003 list of the top 20 young British novelists. His novels appear translated into 15 languages. His essays, reports and stories have appeared in The London Review of Books, New York Review of Books,Granta, The Guardian, and The New Yorker.
O'Hagan was born in Glasgow, and grew up in Kilwinning, North Ayrshire. He is of Irish Catholic descent and attended St Michael's Academy in Kilwinning before studying at the University of Strathclyde.
In 1991, O'Hagan joined the staff of the London Review of Books, where he worked for four years.
In 1995, he published his first book, The Missing, to considerable critical acclaim. The book crosses genres by exploring the lives of people who have gone missing in Britain and the families left behind. The Missing was shortlisted for three literary awards.

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Andrew Sinclair
Andrew Sinclair (born 1935) is a prolific British novelist, historian, biographer, critic and film-maker. He was a Founding Member of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Sinclair did his National Service with the Coldstream Guards and wrote a novel and later a screenplay based on the experience called The Breaking of Bumbo (1959).
He directed the film, now regarded as a classic, of Under Milk Wood. His book The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1967. His biographies have covered a wide variety of famous people: Che Guevara, Dylan Thomas, Jack London, John Ford, J Pierpont Morgan, Francis Bacon, etc. Sinclair is married to the writer Sonia Melchett.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972
Non-fiction
Fiction
Uncollected Short Stories
This article incorporates a fiction bibliography from the corresponding Italian Wikipedia article as of 20 November 2010.

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Angela Huth
Angela Huth (born 1938) is an English novelist and journalist.
Huth is the daughter of the actor Harold Huth. She left school at age 16 in order to paint and to study art in both France and Italy. At 18 she travelled, mostly alone, across the United States before returning to England to work on a variety of newspapers and magazines. She married the journalist and travel writer Quentin Crewe in the 1960s and with him had a daughter, Candida. She presented programmes on the BBC, including How It Is and Why and Man Alive.
She is now most recognised as a successful writer. She has written three collections of short stories and eleven novels, including Land Girls, which was made into the 1998 feature film The Land Girls starring Rachel Weisz and Anna Friel. She also writes plays for radio, television and stage, and is a freelance journalist, critic and broadcaster. Her play The Understanding ran at the Strand Theatre in 1982 and starred Ralph Richardson and Joan Greenwood.
Huth recently edited a collection of eulogies, Well-Remembered Friends, including Seamus Heaney on Ted Hughes, Martin Amis on Kingsley Amis, and Alan Bennett on Peter Cook. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner CBE (born 16 July 1928) is an English language novelist and art historian who was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London.
Brookner was the only child of Newson Bruckner, a Polish immigrant to Britain, and Maude Schiska, a singer whose father had emigrated from Poland and founded a tobacco factory. Maude changed the family's surname to Brookner because of anti-German sentiment in Britain. Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution during the 1930s and World War II.
Brookner was educated at the private James Allen's Girls' School. In 1949 she received a BA in History from King's College London, and in 1953 a doctorate in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art.
In 1967 she became the first woman to hold the Slade professorship at Cambridge University. She was promoted to Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1977, where she worked until her retirement in 1988.

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Anita Desai
Anita Mazumdar Desai (born 24 June 1937) is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1978 for her novel, Fire on the Mountain, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.
Born as Anita Mazumdar to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar in Mussoorie, India. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result it became her "literary language". Despite German being her first language she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult. She began to write in English at the age of seven, and published her first story at the age of nine.
She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book: Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos. They have four children, including Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai. Her children were taken to Thul (near Alibagh) for weekends, where Desai set her novel The Village by the Sea.

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Ann Schlee
Ann Schlee FRSL (born 1934) is a novelist in England.
As a child, Ann was brought up in the United States by her mother and grandparents until the end of the Second World War. After World War II, she began to settle in Cairo, Egypt, with her parents. They later moved to Sudan and Eritrea. Inter alia, she attended boarding school in England and later studied at Somerville College, Oxford.
Schlee has spent much of her writing career in London being quite active in the 1970s to the 1990s.
She won the 1980 Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for her novel The Vandal. Her novel Rhine Journey was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize. She was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.
Ann Schlee lives with her husband, the artist Nick Schlee, in Berkshire with their four children.
Ann Schlee has written a number of books including:

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Ann Thwaite
Ann Thwaite has written five major biographies. "AA Milne: His Life" was the Whitbread Biography of the Year, 1990. "Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape" (Duff Cooper Prize,1985) was described by John Carey as "magnificent - one of the finest literary biographies of our time". "Glimpses of the Wonderful" about the life of Edmund's father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by DJ Taylor in the Independent as one of the "Ten Best Biographies" ever. Frances Hodgson Burnett was originally published (1974) as "Waiting for the Party" and reissued in 2007 with the sub-title "Beyond the Secret Garden". "Emily Tennyson, The Poet's Wife" (1996) was reissued by Faber Finds for the Tennyson bicentenary in 2009.
Born in London, Ann spent the war years in New Zealand, returning to complete her education at Queen Elizabeth's, Barnet, and St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has lived in Tokyo, Benghazi and Nashville, Tennessee. She has lectured in many countries, but most of her life has been spent as a writer, and she is now settled in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite. She is an Oxford D.Litt, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University (National Centre for Research into Children's Literature) and has an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia.

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Anne Enright
Anne Enright (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. A graduate of University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, she resides in Bray, County Wicklow, with her husband and children. She has published essays, short stories, a non-fiction book and four novels.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She has also won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2001 Encore Award and the 2008 Irish Novel of the Year.
Before winning the Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed and widely praised. Her writing explores themes such as family relationships, love and sex, Ireland's difficult past and its modern zeitgeist.
Enright won an international scholarship to Lester B. Pearson United World College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, where she studied for an International Baccalaureate for two years. She received an English and philosophy degree from Trinity College, Dublin. She began writing in earnest when her family gave her an electric typewriter for her 21st birthday. She won a scholarship to the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, where she was taught by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury and earned an M.A.

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Anthony Thwaite
Anthony Simon Thwaite, OBE, (born 1930 in Chester) is an English poet and writer. He is married to the writer Ann Thwaite. He was awarded the OBE in 1992, for services to poetry. He was mainly brought up in Yorkshire and currently lives in Norfolk.
During World War II he stayed with relations in the United States. He was educated at Kingswood School, Bath (1944–49) and subsequently read English at Christ Church, Oxford.
He taught at Tokyo University from 1955 and 1957, and for a year in 1985. He has worked for BBC Radio, the New Statesman as literary editor, and from 1973 to 1985 as editor of Encounter with Melvin J. Lasky. He is one of the literary executors of Philip Larkin, and the major editor of Larkin's work.

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Antonia Fraser
Dame Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, DBE (born 27 August 1932), née Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction, best known as Lady Antonia Fraser. She is the widow of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, and, prior to her husband's death, was also known as Antonia Pinter.
Fraser is the daughter of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), and his wife, Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, née Elizabeth Harman (1906–2002). As the daughter of an Earl, she is accorded the honorific courtesy title "Lady" and thus customarily addressed formally as "Lady Antonia".
As a teenager, she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents. Her "maternal grandparents were Unitarians – a non-conformist faith with a strong emphasis on social reform ...". In response to criticism of her writing about Oliver Cromwell, she has said, "I have no Catholic blood". Before his own conversion in his thirties following a nervous breakdown in the Army, as she explains, "My father was Protestant Church of Ireland, and my mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20 when she abandoned it." She was educated at St Mary's School, Ascot and Dragon School, Oxford and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the last was also her mother's alma mater.

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Arnold Wesker
Sir Arnold Wesker (born 24 May 1932) is a British dramatist known for his contributions to kitchen sink drama. He is the author of 42 plays, 4 volumes of short stories, 2 volumes of essays, a book on journalism, a children's book, extensive journalism, poetry and other assorted writings. His plays have been translated into 17 languages and performed worldwide.
Wesker was born in Stepney, London, the son of Leah (née Perlmutter), a cook, and Joseph Wesker, a tailor's machinist. He was delivered by the father of Oliver Sacks. His early plays Roots, The Kitchen, and Their Very Own and Golden City were staged by The English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre under the management of George Devine and later William Gaskill.
His inspiration for The Kitchen came when he was working at the Bell Hotel in Norwich, which was later made into a film. It was while working here that he also met his future wife Dusty. Roots is also set in Norfolk. Many of Wesker's plays have underlying political themes, and Wesker himself admires the working class side of the 'class struggle'. Wesker joined with enthusiasm the Royal Court group on the Aldermaston March in 1959. Another of the Royal Court contingent, Lindsay Anderson, made a short documentary film (March to Aldermaston) about the event.

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Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler CBE (5 September 1905, Budapest – 1 March 1983, London) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities, he resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work, which gained him international fame.
Over the next 43 years from his residence in Great Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize "for outstanding contribution to European culture" and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, in 1979, with terminal leukaemia. In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at home in London.

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Athol Fugard
Athol Fugard (born 11 June 1932) is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director who writes in English, best known for his political plays opposing the South African system of apartheid and for the 2005 Academy-Award winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood. He is an adjunct professor of playwriting, acting, and directing in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. For academic year 2000–2001, he was the IU Class of 1963 Wells Scholar Professor at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. The recipient of many awards, honors, and honorary degrees, including the 2005 Order of Ikhamanga in Silver "for his excellent contribution and achievements in the theatre" from the government of South Africa, he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Athol Fugard was born as Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, in Middelburg, Eastern Cape, South Africa, on 11 June 1932, to Irish and Afrikaner parents; his mother, Elizabeth Magdalena (née Potgieter), an Afrikaner, operated first a general store and then a lodging house; his father, Harold, was a disabled former jazz pianist of Irish, English and French Huguenot descent. In 1935, his family moved to Port Elizabeth. In 1938, he began attending primary school at Marist Brothers College, a private Catholic school founded by the Marist Brothers; after being awarded a scholarship, he enrolled at a local technical college for secondary education and then studied Philosophy and Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out of the university in 1953, a few months before final examinations. He left home, hitchhiked to North Africa with a friend, and then spent the next two years working in east Asia on a steamer ship, the SS Graigaur, where he began writing, an experience "celebrated" in his 1999 autobiographical play The Captain's Tiger: a memoir for the stage.

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Barry Hines
Melvin Barry Hines, FRSL (born 30 June 1939) is a British author who has written several popular novels and television scripts.
Born in the mining village of Hoyland Common near Barnsley, England, he attended Ecclesfield Grammar School and played football for the England Grammar Schools team. After leaving school without any qualifications he first worked for the National Coal Board as an apprentice mining surveyor at Rockingham Colliery. A neighbour that he chanced to meet at the coal face disapproved of his failure to meet his potential and Hines has said that this was when he decided to return to school to take his examinations. He achieved four A levels, and then studied for a teaching qualification at Loughborough University. He worked as a Physical Education teacher for several years, first for two years in a London comprehensive school, and subsequently in Hoyland Common, where he wrote novels in the school library after the children had gone home. He later became a full-time author.

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Barry Unsworth
Barry Unsworth (born 10 August 1930) is a British novelist who writes historical fiction. He has published 17 novels, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.
Unsworth was born in Wingate, a mining village in County Durham, England.
He graduated from the University of Manchester in 1951, and lived in France for a year teaching English. He also traveled extensively in Greece and Turkey during the 1960s, lecturing at the University of Athens and the University of Istanbul. His novels about fin-de-siecle Ottoman Empire, The Rage of the Vulture and Pascali's Island, were inspired by these experiences. His second novel, The Greeks Have a Word For It, was an out-growth of his teaching experience in Athens.
In 1999 he was a visiting professor at the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2004 he taught literature and creative writing classes at Kenyon College in Ohio.
He currently lives in Umbria, Italy, with his second wife, a Finnish national. His novel After Hannibal is a fictionalised description of his efforts at settlement in the Italian countryside.

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Bernard Bergonzi
Bernard Bergonzi (born 1929) is a British literary scholar, critic and poet. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Warwick and an expert on T. S. Eliot.
He was born in London and studied at the University of Oxford. He had an academic position in Manchester before moving to Warwick, and has held visiting professorships at American universities.

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Bernard O'Donoghue
Bernard O'Donoghue (born 1945) is a noted contemporary Irish poet and academic.
Born in Cullen, County Cork, Ireland, he moved to Manchester, England when he was 16, where he attended St Bede's College. He has lived in Oxford, England since 1965. O'Donoghue is currently fellow and tutor in Old English and Medieval English, Linguistics and the History of the English Language at Wadham College, Oxford University. He was previously Reader at Magdalen College, Oxford, and was a colleague of John Fuller and David Norbrook.He supports Manchester City Football Club.
In 2006, Penguin Books published O'Donoghue's new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. O'Donoghue has a wide range of specialities. He has written on courtly love, Thomas Hoccleve and Seamus Heaney.
His published poetry collections include Poaching Rights (1987), The Absent Signifier (1990), The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder (1995, which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry), and Here Nor There (1999), Poaching Rights (1999) and Outliving (2003).

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Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo, MBE FRSL FRSA, is a British author.
She was born in London to an English mother and Nigerian father and was raised in Woolwich, south-east London.
Evaristo is the author of six books that include: Lara, a verse novel, based on her family history, with roots in England, Nigeria, Ireland, Germany and Brazil (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). It is a revised and expanded (by a third) version of an earlier edition of the book; Hello Mum, a Quick Reads novella about teenage knife crime (Penguin, 2010); Blonde Roots, her first fully prose novel, in which she created a fictional world where Africans enslave Europeans (Penguin UK, 2008/Penguin US, 2009); Soul Tourists, a novel that fuses poetry and prose fiction. Stanley and Jessie drive across Europe in the late 1980s. En route Stanley encounters many ghosts of colour from European history including Alexander Pushkin, Shakespeare’s "Dark Lady of the Sonnets", Mary Seacole, the Chevalier de Saint-George and Alessandro de' Medici (Penguin, 2005); The Emperor’s Babe, a verse novel about a black girl called Zuleika who grows up in Roman London nearly 2,000 years ago (Penguin UK, 2001/ Penguin US, 2002).

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Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge DBE (21 November 1932 – 2 July 2010) was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her sparsely-written psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as "a national treasure". In 2008, The Times newspaper named Bainbridge among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool and raised in nearby Formby. Her parents were Richard Bainbridge and Winifred Baines. Although she gave her date of birth in Who's Who and elsewhere as 21 November 1934, she was born in 1932 and her birth was registered in the first quarter of 1933. When German former prisoner of war Harry Arno Franz wrote to her in November 1947, he mentioned her 15th birthday.
She enjoyed writing, and by the age of 10 she was keeping a diary. She had elocution lessons and, when she was 11, appeared on the Northern Children's Hour radio show, alongside Billie Whitelaw and Judith Chalmers. Bainbridge was expelled from Merchant Taylors' Girls' School (Crosby) because she was caught with a "dirty rhyme" (as she later described it), written by someone else, in her gymslip pocket. She then went on to study at Cone-Ripman School, Tring, Hertfordshire (now:Tring Park School for the Performing Arts [1], where she found she was good at history, English and art. The summer she left school, she fell in love with a former German POW who was waiting to be repatriated. For the next six years, the couple corresponded and tried to get permission for the German man to return to Britain so that they could be married. But permission was denied and the relationship ended in 1953.

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Bevis Hillier
Bevis Hillier (born March 28, 1940) is an English art historian, author and journalist. He has written on Art Deco, and also a biography of Sir John Betjeman.
Hillier was born in Redhill, Surrey, his father was Jack Hillier, an authority and author on Japanese art. His mother was Mary Louise Hillier, an author on wax dolls and automata. Hillier was educated at Reigate Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford where he won the Gladstone Memorial Prize for History. He was employed as a journalist on The Times in 1963.
In 1968 his book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s was published by Studio Vista. This was the first major work on a hitherto neglected period of art, which had been previously been referred to by the name Art Moderne (The term Art Moderne thenceforth was used to refer to the later streamline style of Art Deco in the 1930s.). His use of the term Art Deco was adopted as the definitive term for this style of design. A year later, also by Studio Vista, he published a book concentrating on the art of caricature from the 13th century to the then present day. The book was simply entitled Cartoons and Caricatures. In 1971 he curated a major Art Deco show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts which along with his 1968 book greatly increased popular awareness of this style.

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Bishop of Salisbury
The Bishop of Salisbury is the ordinary of the Church of England's Diocese of Salisbury in the Province of Canterbury.
The diocese covers much of the counties of Wiltshire and Dorset. The see is in the City of Salisbury where the bishop's seat is located at the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Diocese of Sherborne, created circa AD 705 was the origin of the present diocese, St Aldhelm being the first bishop. The see was removed successively to Salisbury or Sarum (Old Sarum) under the rulings of the Council of London, and then finally to Salisbury (New Sarum) in 1227 under King Henry III. The current bishop is the Right Reverend Nick Holtam, the 78th Bishop of Salisbury, who was consecrated at St Paul's Cathedral on 22 July 2011 and enthroned in Salisbury Cathedral on 15 October 2011.
List of the bishops of the Diocese of Salisbury and its precursor offices:

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Bishop of St David's
The Bishop of St David's is the ordinary of the Church in Wales Diocese of St David's.
The succession of bishops stretches back to Saint David who in the 6th century established his seat in what is today the city of St David's in Pembrokeshire, founding St David's Cathedral. The current Bishop of St. David's is the Right Reverend Wyn Evans, who succeeded to the post on 1 September 2008.
The history of the diocese of St David's is traditionally traced to that saint in the latter half of the 6th century Records of the history of the diocese before Norman times are very fragmentary, however, consisting of a few chance references in old chronicles, such as 'Annales Cambriae' and 'Brut y Tywysogion' (Rolls Series).
Originally corresponding with the boundaries of Dyfed (Demetia), St David's eventually comprised all the country south of the River Dyfi and west of the English border, with the exception of the greater part of Glamorganshire, in all some 3,500 square miles (9,100 km²).
The early ecclesiastical organisation of the Welsh church is unclear but scanty references reveal that some form of Archbishopric definitely existed, with multiple bishops under the jurisdiction of a senior see. One of the earliest mentions of the religious community at St David's Cathedral comes in the work of Asser who was trained there. In his Life of King Alfred c. 893 Asser clearly describes his kinsman, Nobis, also of St David's, as Archbishop. In the Annales Cambriae, Elfodd is termed 'archbishop of the land of Gwynedd’ in his obit, under the year 809.

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Blake Morrison
Philip Blake Morrison (born 8 October 1950) is a British poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the James Bulger murder, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Morrison was born in Skipton, North Yorkshire, to an English father and an Irish mother. His parents were both physicians; his mother's maiden name was Agnes O'Shea, but her husband persuaded her to change "Agnes" to "Kim". The details of his mother's life in Ireland, to which he had not been privy, formed the basis for his autobiographical novel, Things My Mother Never Told Me.
Blake Morrison attended Ermysted's Grammar School before going on to study English Literature at the University of Nottingham and UCL. He worked for the Times Literary Supplement (1978-81)' and was literary editor of both The Observer (1981-89) and the Independent on Sunday (1989-95). Morrison's early writing career outside of journalism was as a poet and poetry critic. He became a full-time writer in 1995 and has since produced novels and volumes of autobiography as well as plays, libretti, and writing for television. He has contributed articles to The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, the New York Times and Poetry Review and since 2001 he has written regularly for The Guardian. In 2003 he became Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, London, and in 2008 he became Chair of The Reader Organisation, the UK centre for research and promotion of reading as a therapeutic activity.

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Brenda Maddox
Brenda Maddox FRSL is an American author, journalist, and biographer, who has lived in the UK since 1959.
Born in Brockton, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University (class of 1953) with a degree in English literature and also studied at the London School of Economics. She is a book reviewer for The Observer, The Times, New Statesman, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and regularly contributes to BBC Radio 4 as a critic and commentator. Her biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, D. H. Lawrence, Nora Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Rosalind Franklin have been widely acclaimed. She has won the Los Angeles Times Biography Award, the Silver PEN Award, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the Whitbread Biography Prize.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
Maddox lives in London and spends time at her cottage near Brecon, Wales where she and her late husband, Sir John Maddox, were actively involved within the local community. She is vice-president of the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature, member of the Editorial Board of British Journalism Review, and a past chairman of the Broadcasting Press Guild. Maddox has two children and two stepchildren.

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Brian Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE (born 18 August 1925) is an English author of both general fiction and science fiction. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society. He is also (with Harry Harrison) co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. Aldiss was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000, and has received two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and one John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His influential works include the short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long", the basis for the Stanley Kubrick-developed Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
Aldiss's father ran a department store that his grandfather had established, and the family lived above it. At the age of 6, Brian was sent to board at West Buckland School in Devon, which he attended until his late teens. In 1943, he joined the Royal Signals regiment, and saw action in Burma; his Army experience inspired the Horatio Stubbs second and third books^{[citation needed]}.

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Brian Friel
Brian Friel (born 9 January 1929) is an Irish dramatist, author and director of the Field Day Theatre Company. He is considered to be the greatest living English-language dramatist, hailed by the English-speaking world as an "Irish Chekhov" and "the universally accented voice of Ireland". Friel is best known for plays such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing at Lughnasa but has written more than thirty plays in a six-decade spanning career that has seen him elected Saoi of Aosdána. His plays have been a regular feature on Broadway throughout this time.
Philadelphia, Here I Come! was turned into a film in 1975, starring Donal McCann, directed by John Quested, screenplay by Brian Friel. In 1980 Friel co-founded Field Day Theatre Company and his play Translations was the company's first production.Neil Jordan completed a screenplay for a film version of Translations that was never produced. With Field Day Friel has collaborated with Seamus Heaney, 1995 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Heaney and Friel have been friends from a young age.

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Brian Patten
Brian Patten (born 7 February 1946, Liverpool) is an English poet.
Born near Liverpool's docks, he attended Sefton Park School in the Smithdown Road area of Liverpool, where he was noted for his essays and greatly encouraged in his work by Harry Sutcliffe his form teacher. He left school at fifteen and began work for The Bootle Times writing a column on popular music. One of his first articles was on Roger McGough and Adrian Henri, two pop-oriented Liverpool Poets who later joined Patten in a best-selling poetry anthology called The Mersey Sound, drawing popular attention to his own contemporary collections Little Johnny's Confession (1967) and Notes to the Hurrying Man (1969). Patten received early encouragement from Philip Larkin.
The collections Storm Damage (1988) and Armada (1996) are more varied, the latter featuring a sequence of poems concerning the death of his mother and memories of his childhood. Armada is perhaps Patten's most mature and formal book, dispensing with much of the playfulness of former work. He has also written comic verse for children, notably Gargling With Jelly and Thawing Frozen Frogs.

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Bruce Arnold
Bruce Arnold (born July 31, 1955 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA) is an American jazz guitarist, composer, educator and author residing in New York City. His explorations into the applications of 20th century classical theory in contemporary forms such as rock and jazz has created a unique compositional and improvisational sound. As a guest artist Arnold has toured Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, Japan, Mexico, Russia and the United States.
His performance and recording activities include work with a wide array of styles. He has played with such diverse musicians as Stuart Hamm, Peter Erskine, Joe Pass, Joe Lovano, Lenny Pickett, Randy Brecker, Stanley Clarke, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Absolute Ensemble under the baton of Kristjan Järvi.
Bruce Arnold's recording credits include over twenty five CDs and DVDs (on Muse-eek Records, MelBay Recordings, Truefire and other labels), ranging from the standard jazz repertoire to free improvisation to the reinterpretations of classical music with the ensemble Spooky Actions. His compositions are published by Muse Eek Publishing and MelBay Productions.

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Bryony Lavery
Bryony Lavery (born 1947) is a British dramatist, known for her successful and award-winning 1998 play Frozen. In addition to her work in theatre, she has also written for television and radio. She has written books including the biography Tallulah Bankhead and The Woman Writer's Handbook, and taught playwriting at Birmingham University.
Having begun her career as an actress, she decided that she was fed up with playing poor parts in plays, such as the left arm of a sofa, and decided to write plays with better parts for women.^{[citation needed]} Early in her career she founded a theatre company called Les Oeufs Malades with actor Gerard Bell, she also founded Female Trouble, More Female Trouble and served as artistic director of Gay Sweatshop.
Her plays have a feminist undertone in them and she has even written plays (like More Light which has only one male speaking role) with almost entirely female casts. She has written more than twenty plays since 1976.
In addition to her original plays and adaptations, she has authored translations of foreign works such as her 2007 version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

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C. K. Stead
Christian Karlson Stead, ONZ, CBE (born 17 October 1932) is a New Zealand writer whose works include novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism.
One of Karl Stead's novels, Smith's Dream, provided the basis for the film Sleeping Dogs, starring Sam Neill; this became the first New Zealand film released in the United States. Mansfield: A Novel was a finalist for the 2005 Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize and received commendation in the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the South East Asia and South Pacific region.
C. K. Stead was born in Auckland. For much of his career he was Professor of English at the University of Auckland, retiring in 1986 to write full-time. He received a CBE in 1985 and was admitted into the highest honour New Zealand can bestow, the Order of New Zealand in 2007.

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Candia McWilliam
Candia McWilliam (born 1 July 1955) is a Scottish author. Her father was the architectural writer and academic Colin McWilliam.
Born in Edinburgh, McWilliam was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she obtained first class honours. Her first novel, A Case of Knives, published in 1988, was the winner of a Betty Trask Prize. Her second novel, A Little Stranger, was published in 1989. Both books won Scottish Arts Council Book Awards.Debatable Land, published in 1994, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and in 1998 its Italian translation won the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year.
Candia McWilliam was one of the judges of the 2006 Man Booker Prize.
In 2004 Candia McWilliam admitted to an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that she had struggled with alcoholism. In early 2006, McWilliam began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became severely visually impaired as a result. This illness caused her eyelids to be permanently shut, although her eyes were still perfect. In 2007 she spoke about the experience of blindness at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and in 2008 she wrote an article about her situation for the Scottish Review of Books. In 2009 she underwent an operation which harvested tendons from her leg in order to suspend her eyelids open, thus curing her blindness.

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Carmen Callil
Carmen Thérèse Callil (15 July 1938) is a publisher, writer and critic. She founded Virago Press in 1973.
Callil was born in Melbourne Australia, but has lived in London since 1960. Her mother Lorraine Clare Allen, widowed in her early forties, raised four children of whom Carmen was the third. Her father, Frederick Alfred Louis Callil was a barrister and bibliophile, and a Lecturer in French at Melbourne University.
Callil was educated at Star of the Sea Convent, and at Loreto Mandeville Hall. She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA Arts degree in History and Literature in 1960.
In the same year she left for Europe, and, after a period in Italy, settled in London in 1964. She worked for Marks & Spencer as a buying assistant, then, after placing an advertisement in the Times Newspaper: "Australian, B.A. wants job in book publishing", began work at Hutchinson Publishing company in 1965. From 1967-1970 she was Publicity Manager of the paperback imprint Panther Books, and later all imprints of Granada Publishing, and then at Anthony Blond and André Deutsch. She left to work for Ink, a countercultural Newspaper founded by Richard Neville, Andrew Fisher, Felix Dennis and Ed Victor in 1971. Ink was an offshoot of Oz and was intended to be a bridge between the underground press of the 1960s and the national newspapers of that time. Launched in April 1971, it collapsed with the Oz trial for obscenity of Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson.

wn.com/Carmen_Callil

Carol Rumens
Carol Rumens FRSL (born 10 December 1944 Forest Hill, South London) is a British poet.
Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill, South London. She won a scholarship to grammar school and later studied Philosophy at London University, but left before completing her degree. She gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for the Stage (with Distinction) from City College Manchester in 2001.
She taught at University of Kent at Canterbury (1983-5), Queen's University Belfast (1991-3 and 1995-8)), University College Cork (1994), University of Stockholm (1999), and University of Hull. As visiting Professor of Creative Writing, she now teaches at the University of Wales, Bangor. and the University of Hull.
Rumens was Poetry Editor for the publisher Quarto (1982-4) and the Literary Review (1984–1988). Her work has appeared in The Guardian, and Harper's. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984.

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Caroline Moorehead
Caroline Moorehead (born 28 October 1944) is a human rights journalist and biographer.
Born in London, England, Moorehead received a BA from the University of London in 1965.
Moorehead has written six biographies, of Bertrand Russell, Heinrich Schliemann, Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn, and most recently, the life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin (the daughter in law of Jean-Frédéric de la Tour du Pin), who experienced the French Revolution and left a rich collection of letters as well as a memoir that cover the decades from the fall of the Ancien Regime up to the rise of Napoleon III.
Moorehead has also written a number of non-fiction pieces centered on human rights including a history of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dunant's Dream, based on previously unseen archives in Geneva, Troublesome People, a book on pacifists, and a work on terrorism, Hostages to Fortune. Her most recent work in this category is on refugees in the modern world named Human Cargo, published in 2004. Moorehead is currently working on a new book about 230 French women of the Resistance who were sent to Auschwitz, and of whom only forty-nine survived.

wn.com/Caroline_Moorehead

Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips (born 13 March 1958) is a British writer with a Caribbean background, best known as a novelist. He is now professor at Yale University and a visiting professor at Barnard College of Columbia University.
He was born on St. Kitts. At four months old, his family moved to England and was brought up in Leeds, Yorkshire. He read English at Queen's College, Oxford. He mainly began writing drama scripts.
He has tackled themes on the African slave trade from many angles. His work has been recognised by numerous awards including Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book award for A Distant Shore. Beside being an accomplished writer, Caryl Phillips is also a noted professor. He has taught at numerous universities in countries including: Barbados, Ghana, India, Singapore, Sweden, and the United States of America.

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Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (

/ˈtʃɑrlz ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic who is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and the creator of some of the world's most memorable fictional characters. During his lifetime Dickens' works enjoyed unprecedented popularity and fame, but it was in the twentieth century that his literary genius was fully recognized by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to enjoy an enduring popularity among the general reading public.
Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens left school to work in a factory after his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Though he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

wn.com/Charles_Dickens

Charles Nicholl
Charles "Boomer" Bowen Nicholl (19 June 1870 - 9 July 1939) was a Welsh international rugby union forward who played club rugby for Cambridge University and Llanelli. Nicholl played for Wales on fifteen occasions during the 1891 and 1896 Home Nations Championships, and was part of the historic 1893 Triple Crown winning team.
Nicholl was recognised as an 'uncompromising' forward and was described as "The most distinguished member of the least distinguished college ... fond of smoking and a connoisseur of exhilarating beverages, in which strength rather than delicacy of bouquet is a predominant feature"
Nicholl was born in Llanegwad, Carmarthenshire in 1870 to Thomas Beynon Nicholl; he was educated at Llandovery College before graduating to Queens' College, Cambridge in 1890. He was awarded his BA in 1893, but did not complete his MA until 1906. While at Cambridge he won five sporting Blues, four in rugby between 1890 and 1893, and one in athletics in 1893. After leaving university Nicholl became Assistant Master at Blair Lodge School for two years before spending four year at Aravon School in Bray.

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Chinua Achebe
Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe (born 16 November 1930) popularly known as Chinua Achebe (

/ˈtʃɪnwɑː əˈtʃɛbeɪ/) is a Nigeriannovelist, poet, professor, and critic. He is best known for his first novel and magnum opus,Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in modern African literature.
Raised by parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe writes his novels in English and has defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature. In 1975, his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" became the focus of controversy, for its criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a bloody racist" and was later published. In 2011, The Guardian of London named An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books ever written.

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Christopher Bigsby
Christopher William Edgar Bigsby (Born 27th June 1941) is a British literary analyst and novelist, with more than forty books to his credit. Earlier in his writing career, his books were published under the name C. W. E. Bigsby.
Educated at the Universities of Sheffield and Nottingham, he is Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. He is also an occasional contributor to BBC Radio, and presented Kaleidoscope (Radio 4) for eight years in the 1980s. During this time, he collaborated with the writer Malcolm Bradbury on an 8-part comedy series called 'Patterson', which followed the experiences of a new lecturer at a provincial university, and may have been partly autobiographical. Unusually this series was broadcast on Radio Three. His first book was Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-66 (1967). One of Bigsby's recent novels, first published in March 2002, is the well-reviewed Beautiful Dreamer. His latest novel is One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights, published August 23, 2007 by Methuen (ISBN 0413776565).

wn.com/Christopher_Bigsby

Christopher Hampton
Christopher James Hampton, CBE, FRSL (born 26 January 1946) is a British playwright, screen writer and film director. He is best known for his play based on the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and the film version Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and also more recently for writing the nominated screenplay for the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement.
Hampton was born in Faial, Azores, to British parents Dorothy Patience (née Herrington) and Bernard Patrick Hampton, a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable & Wireless. His father's job led the family to subsequently settle in Aden and Alexandria in Egypt and later Hong Kong and Zanzibar. The Suez Crisis in 1956 necessitated that the family flee under cover of darkness, leaving their possessions behind.
After a prep school at Reigate, Hampton went to the independent boarding school Lancing College at the age of 13, where he won house colours for boxing and distinguished himself as a sergeant in the CCF. Fellow dramatist David Hare was a school contemporary; poet Harry Guest was a teacher.

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Christopher Hope
Christopher Hope (born 26 February 1944) is a South African novelist and poet who is known for his controversial works dealing with racism and politics in South Africa.
Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Dudley Mitford and Kathleen Margaret Hope. As an Afrikaner in South Africa, Hope questioned the special treatment of Caucasians in that country. These feelings would eventually work their way into Hope's most famous writings.^{[citation needed]} Hope was educated at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Natal. He served in the South African Navy beginning in 1962. Hope married Eleanor Marilyn Margaret Klein 18 February 1967. The couple would eventually divorce. Hope worked briefly as a journalist before leaving on a "self-imposed" exile to London, England. His autobiographical piece, White Boy Running, chronicles this time of Hope's life.
Hope's poetry was first published in Whitewashes, a poetry book that was released in 1971. In 1974, his poetry was published as Cape Drives, a collection of original prose. Hope's first novel, A Separate Development, was published in 1981. The novel was banned in South Africa for its overt criticisms of the Apartheid government

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Christopher Ondaatje
Sir Philip Christopher Ondaatje, OC, CBE (born February 22, 1933) is a Sri Lankan born Canadian-English businessman, philanthropist, adventurer, writer and bob-sledding Olympian for Canada. Ondaatje is the older brother of author Michael Ondaatje and lives in the United Kingdom.
Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to a Burgher family of Dutch and Indian origin, Ondaatje went to Blundell's School in the United Kingdom. His name comes from an Indian ancestor called Ondaatchi from Thanjavur, South India. After his alcoholic father lost the family fortune, Ondaatje had to leave school a year from graduation. In 1956, Ondaatje emigrated to Canada, arriving in Toronto with virtually no money. He quickly began to rebuild the family fortune, becoming a wealthy stockbroker, going on to be one of the three founding members of Loewen Ondaatje McCutcheon. He became a multi-millionaire in the publishing industry by founding the Pagurian Press, which he later sold to the Bronfman family.
He represented Canada in the four-man bobsled at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. Although the first Canadian men's team won gold in the event, Ondaatje's team finished 14th out of 18 competitors.

wn.com/Christopher_Ondaatje

Christopher Reid
Christopher Reid FRSL (born 13 May 1949) is a Hong Kong-born British poet, essayist, cartoonist, and writer. He has been nominated twice for the Whitbread Awards in 1996 and in 1997. A contemporary of Martin Amis, he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He is one of the exponents of Martian poetry which employs unusual metaphors to render everyday experiences and objects unfamiliar. He has worked as poetry editor at Faber and Faber and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull. In January 2010 he was awarded the 2009 Costa Book Award for A Scattering, written as a tribute to his late wife, the actress Lucinda Gane. The work won in the poetry category, and overall Best Book of the Year, becoming the first poet to take the overall prize since Seamus Heaney in 1999.
His poem "A Pub Band" is featured in the 2004 anthology Wild Reckoning, which was inspired by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

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Christopher Ricks
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA (born 1933) is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (U.S.) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book-length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis, W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner has praised his 'intent eloquence', and Geoffrey Hill his 'unrivalled critical intelligence'.W. H. Auden described Ricks as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'.. John Carey calls him the 'greatest living critic.

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Claire Harman
Claire Harman is a British actress best known for her lead role in the Brookside DVD Unfinished Business. She has also had a starring role in the second series of Sky TV's Is Harry on the Boat.
Claire's other TV credits include Casualty, Doctors, Mersey Beat and Coronation Street.
Her film credits include About a Boy and Last Orders.
TV
Film

wn.com/Claire_Harman

Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalin (nėe Delavenay, 20 June 1933) is an English biographer and journalist. She was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.
She was literary editor of the New Statesman and of the Sunday Times, and has written several noted biographies. Her work has been recognised with the award of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1991 Hawthornden Prize for The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. Her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book Award in 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2003, the Latham Prize of the Samuel Pepys Club in 2003, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003.
Claire Tomalin is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English PEN (International PEN).
Tomalin's first husband Nicholas Tomalin, a prominent journalist, was killed in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973; she is now married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.
She made a number of tongue-in-cheek criticisms against the Samuel Pepys Wikipedia article in The Guardian on 24 October 2005, awarding the page a score of 6/10. On 4 April 2009, Tomalin wrote to The Guardian and expressed facts on Thomas Hardy's life. The letter was titled "A Poet to the End".

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Clive James
Clive Vivian Leopold James, CBE, AM (born 7 October 1939), born Vivian James, is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism. He has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since the early 1960s.
James was born in Kogarah, Sydney. He was allowed to change his name as a child because "after Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O'Hara the name became irrevocably a girl's name no matter how you spelled it".
His father was taken prisoner by the Japanese during World War II. Although he survived the POW camp, he died when the plane returning him to Australia crashed in Manila Bay; he was buried in Hong Kong. James, who was an only child, was brought up by his mother in the Sydney suburb of Kogarah.
In Unreliable Memoirs, James says an IQ test taken in childhood put his IQ at 140. He was educated at Sydney Technical High School (despite winning a bursary award to Sydney Boys High School) and the University of Sydney, where he studied Psychology and became associated with the Sydney Push, a libertarian, intellectual subculture. At the university, he edited the student newspaper, Honi Soit, and directed the annual Union Revue. After graduating, James worked for a year as an Assistant Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín (Irish pronunciation: [ˈkɔl̪ˠəmˠ t̪ˠoːˈbʲiːnʲ]; born 30 May 1955) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and, most recently, poet. He is regarded by certain critics as having excelled at the many literary forms with which he has experimented.
Tóibín is Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University in New Jersey and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was hailed as a champion of minorities as he collected the 2011 Irish PEN Award. In 2011, he was named one of "Britain's top 300 intellectuals" by The Observer, despite being Irish.
Tóibín's parents were Bríd and Michael Tóibín. He was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland. He is the second youngest of five children. His grandfather, Patrick Tobin, was a member of the IRA, as was his grand-uncle Michael Tobin. Patrick Tobin took part in the 1916 Rebellion in Enniscorthy and was subsequently interned in Frongoch in Wales. Colm Tóibín's father was a teacher who was involved in the Fianna Fáil party in Enniscorthy. He received his secondary education at St Peter's College, Wexford, where he was a boarder between 1970 and 1972. He later spoke of finding some of the priests attractive.

wn.com/Colm_Tóibín

Connop Thirlwall
Connop Thirlwall (11 January 1797 - 27 July 1875) was an English bishop (in Wales) and historian.
Thirlwall was born at Stepney, London, of a Northumbrian family. He was a prodigy, learning Latin at three, Greek at four, and writing sermons at seven.
He went to Charterhouse School, where George Grote and Julius Hare were among his schoolfellows. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1814. gained the Craven university scholarship and the chancellor's classical medal and served as Secretary of the Cambridge Union Society in the Lent term, 1817. In October 1818 he was elected to a fellowship, and went for a year's travel on the Continent. In Rome he made friends with Christian Charles Josias Bunsen, which had a most important influence on his life. On his return, "distrust of his own resolutions and convictions" led him to abandon for the time his intention of being a clergyman, and he settled down to study law, though he did not lose interest in other subjects. In the meantime, he took on the task of translating and prefacing Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher's essay on the Gospel of St Luke. He further rendered two of Johann Ludwig Tieck's most recent Novellen into English. In 1827 he made up his mind to finish with law, and was ordained deacon the same year.

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Correlli Barnett
Correlli Douglas Barnett CBE FRSL (born 28 June 1927) is an English military historian, who has also written works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline".
Barnett was born on 28 June 1927 in Norbury, Surrey, the son of Douglas and Kathleen Barnett. He was educated at Trinity School of John Whitgift in Croydon and then Exeter College, Oxford where he gained a second class honours degree in Modern History with his special subject being Military History and the Theory of War, gaining an MA in 1954. Barnett later said: "I can safely say there were only two books that I read at Oxford which strongly influenced my subsequent approach – one part of the Special Subject, and the other something which a friend recommended to me. The first was Clausewitz's On War, which was part of a Special Subject on military history and the theory of war. The other was Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization – if I read it again now I do not know what I would think of it, but certainly that was a starting point for my interest in looking at history in technological terms rather than in the constitutional/political terms prevalent at Oxford".

wn.com/Correlli_Barnett

D. J. Taylor
David John Taylor (born 1960) is a British critic, novelist and biographer. After attending school in Norwich, he read Modern History at St John's College, Oxford, and has received the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award for his biography of George Orwell. His novel Derby Day was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Previously a member of Norwich Writers' Circle.
He lives in Norwich and contributes to The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, The Spectator, Private Eye and Literary Review among other publications.

wn.com/D._J._Taylor

Dan Jacobson
Dan Jacobson (born 7 March 1929 in Johannesburg, South Africa) is a novelist, short story writer, critic and essayist. He has lived in Great Britain for most of his adult life, and for many years held a professorship in the English Department at University College London. He has also spent periods as a visiting writer or a guest-professor at universities in the United States, Australia, and South Africa, and has given lectures and readings in many other countries.
His early novels, including The Trap, his first published novel, focus on South African themes. His later works have been various in kind: they include works of fantasy and fictional treatments of historical episodes, as well as memoirs, critical essays, and travel books. Among the awards and prizes he has received are the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1959 (A Long Way from London and Other Stories); Somerset Maugham Award 1964 (Time of Arrival and Other Essays); The Jewish Chronicle Award 1977 (The Confessions of Josef Baisz); the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography 1986 (Time and Time Again). In the year 2000 he edited and translated from the Dutch Een mond vol Glas by Henk van Woerden, an imaginative re-creation of the circumstances leading to the assassination of a South African president, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, in the country's House of Assembly.

wn.com/Dan_Jacobson

Dannie Abse
Daniel Abse, CBE (born 22 September 1923) is a Welsh poet.
Abse was born in Cardiff, Wales to a Jewish family. He is the younger brother of politician and reformer Leo Abse and the eminent psychoanalyst, Wilfred Abse. Abse first studied medicine at the University of Wales, and then at Westminster Hospital and King's College London.
Although best known as a poet, Abse worked in the medical field, and was a specialist at a chest clinic for over thirty years. He has received numerous literary awards and fellowships for his writing. In 1989, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Wales. His first poetic volume, After Every Green Thing, was published in 1949. His autobiographic work, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, was published in 1954. He won the Welsh Arts Council Award in both 1971 and 1987, and the Cholmondeley Award in 1985. He has been a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature since 1983.
Abse has lived for several decades in the northwest area of London, mainly near Hampstead where he has considerable ties. For several years he wrote a column for the "Ham & High" (Hampstead and Highgate Express) local newspaper. The articles were subsequently published in book form.

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David Cannadine
Sir David Nicholas Cannadine, FBA (born 7 September 1950) is a British historian, known for a number of books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy and Ornamentalism. He is also notable as a commentator and broadcaster on British public life, especially the monarchy. He serves as the general editor of the Penguin History of Europe series. He was at the University of London from 1998 to 2003 working at the Institute of Historical Research but is currently a professor at Princeton University.
Born in Birmingham, Cannadine attended King Edward VI Five Ways school there. He read history at Clare College, Cambridge, and wrote a doctorate on the history of the development of the Calthorpe Estate, Edgbaston, Birmingham, while at St John's College, Oxford, supervised by Peter Mathias. He also studied at Princeton University.
From 1975-1977 he was a junior research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge before being appointed University Lecturer and Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge in 1977. While never a student of J. H. Plumb at Christ's, Cannadine was influenced by him.

wn.com/David_Cannadine

David Caute
John David Caute (born December 16, 1936 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a British author, novelist, playwright, historian and journalist.
Caute was educated at Edinburgh Academy, Wellington, Wadham College, Oxford and St Antony's College, Oxford. A Henry Fellow at Harvard, he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1959, but resigned in 1965. From 1966 to 1985 Caute held various academic positions, including Reader at Brunel University, and Visiting Professor at NYU. Columbia, UC Irvine, and Bristol University. He was Literary Editor of the New Statesman 1979-80, and Co-Chairman of the Writers' Guild of GB, 1982. His novel Comrade Jacob (1961) was adapted as the film Winstanley (1975). He has been a JP and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

wn.com/David_Caute

David Constantine
David Constantine (born 1944) is a British, Lancashire born poet and translator.
Constantine is a Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford University, and a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford. He is co-editor of the literary journal Modern Poetry in Translation. Along with the Irish poet Bernard O'Donoghue, he is Commissioning Editor of the Oxford Poets imprint of Carcanet Press and has been a chief judge for the TS Eliot Prize.
His collections of poetry include Madder, Watching for Dolphins, Caspar Hauser, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize), Collected Poems and Nine Fathom Deep. He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter than Air won the Popescu Prize.
He is also author of one novel, Davies and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. He has published three collections of short stories, Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (2005) and The Shieling (2009), the last of which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He lives in Oxford, where he edits Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

wn.com/David_Constantine

David Dabydeen
David Dabydeen (born 9 December 1955) is a Guyanese-born critic, writer, novelist and academic. Since 2010 he has been Guyana's ambassador to China.
Dabydeen was born in Berbice, Guyana, his birth registered at New Amsterdam Registrar of Births as David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram. His parents divorced while he was young and he grew up with his mother, Veronica Dabydeen, and his maternal grandparents. At the age of 10 he won a scholarship to Queen's College in Georgetown. When he was 13 years old, he moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, attorney David Harilal Sookram, who had migrated to Britain.
At the age of 18 he took up a place at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, to read English, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with honours. He then gained a Ph.D. in 18th-century literature and art at University College London in 1982, and was awarded a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford.
Between 1982 and 1984 Dabydeen worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton. He subsequently went to the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, where he progressed over the years from lecturer to director. He was president of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, and Asian Literature between 1985 and 1987. He is a Professor at the Centre for British Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University.

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David Dilks
David N. Dilks, PhD, FRHistS, FRSL, (born 17 April 1938), is a British historian and emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Leeds. He was born in Foleshill, a suburb of Coventry, and attended The Royal Grammar School before winning a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, to read History. He remained in Oxford to do research at St Antony's College before becoming research assistant to Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. He was the official biographer of the latter as well as producing a two-volume biography of the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, and a two-volume biography of Neville Chamberlain.
In 1977 he became a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Professor Dilks became Vice Chancellor of the University of Hull in 1991, a position he retained until 1999.

wn.com/David_Dilks

David Harsent
David Harsent (born in Devon on 9 December 1942) is an English poet & TV scriptwriter. As Jack Curtis and David Lawrence he has published a number of crime fiction novels.
During his early career he was part of a circle of poets centred around Ian Hamilton, and forming something of a school, promoting conciseness and imagist-like clarity in verse, though his work has changed and developed a good deal since then.^{[citation needed]}
He has published nine collections of poetry which have won several literary prizes and awards. Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 and was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread Awards. His work in music theatre has involved collaborations with a number of composers (but most often with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, the opera Gawain being their most notable collaboration) and has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Southbank Centre, The Proms, the Wiener Kammeroper, and broadcast on BBC Two, Channel 4 and Trio (USA). A new opera, The Minotaur (also with Birtwistle) opened at The Royal Opera House in 2008. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Holloway University and in 2005 he was appointed Distinguished Writing Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, where he is now a visiting professor.

wn.com/David_Harsent

David Kynaston
David Kynaston (pronounced "kin-us-tun") (born 30 July 1951, Aldershot) is an English historian and author of many books on English social history. He has published articles in the New Statesman and other magazines and journals.^{[citation needed]}
Kynaston was educated at Wellington College and New College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1973, and was awarded a PhD at the London School of Economics. He became a Visiting Professor at Kingston University in 2001.
In 2007 he published Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 to much acclaim, being the first volume of six books in a series Tales of a New Jerusalem, in which he intends to chronicle the history of Great Britain from 1945 to Margaret Thatcher becoming Prime Minister in 1979.
Austerity Britain was named book of the decade by The Sunday Times. The second volume, Family Britain, was serialized on BBC Radio 4 as its Book of the Week from 23 November 2009, read by Dominic West. The concluding 'Afterword' of Family Britain indicates that the next volume may be entitled Modernity Britain.

wn.com/David_Kynaston

David Lodge (author)
David John Lodge CBE, (born 28 January 1935 at Brockley, London, England) is an English author and literary critic.
Lodge was Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham until 1987, and he is best known for his novels satirizing academic life, particularly the 'Campus Trilogy': Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988). Small World and Nice Work were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another major theme in his work is Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960).
He has also written several television screenplays and three stage plays. Since retiring from academia he has continued to publish works of literary criticism, which often draw on his own experience as a practising novelist and scriptwriter.
David Lodge was born into a Catholic family in Brockley in south east London. His father was a saxophonist in a dance band, and later became a TV extra. Lodge's first published novel The Picturegoers (1960) draws on his early experiences in 'Brickley' (based on Brockley), and he revisits them again in a later novel, Therapy. World War II forced Lodge and his mother to evacuate to Surrey and Cornwall. He attended school at the Catholic St Joseph's Academy, Blackheath.

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David Malouf
David George Joseph Malouf (born 20 March 1934) is an acclaimed Australian writer. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Malouf was born in Brisbane, Australia, to a Christian Lebanese father and an English-born mother of Portuguese Sephardi Jewish descent.
He was an avid reader as a child, and at 12 years old was reading such books as Wuthering Heights, Bleak House and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. These books, he says, taught him about sex: "They told you there was a life out there that was amazingly passionate". He attended Brisbane Grammar School and graduated from the University of Queensland in 1955. He lectured for a short period before moving to London, where he taught at Holland Park School before relocating to Birkenhead in 1962. He returned to Australia in 1968 and lectured at the University of Sydney, taught at his old school, and lectured in English at the Universities of Queensland and Sydney.

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David Pownall
David Pownall FRSL (born 19 May 1938) is a British playwright and author of novels and short stories. Some of his plays have been adapted as films, for instance, Music to Murder By (1976), and others were written as radio plays.
David Pownall was born in Liverpool. He graduated from Keele University in 1960.
He worked as a personnel officer with the Ford Motor Company, Dagenham, Essex, from 1960-63. In 1963, Pownall moved to Zambia to take up a post as the personnel manager at Anglo-American PLC and lived and worked there until 1969; he had several early plays produced there.
Returning to England to write full time, he became the resident writer of the Century Theatre touring group, from 1970-72. He was resident writer of the Duke's Playhouse, Lancaster, from 1972–75, and had several plays produced by them. His plays reflected the local environment, as well as meditations on the plays of Shakespeare.
He helped found the Paines Plough Theatre, first based in Coventry, where he was resident writer from 1975-80. In 1977, his play Richard III, Part Two, first produced by Paines Plough, was taken to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

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David Profumo
David John Profumo FRSL (born 20 October 1955 in London) is an English novelist.
He is the son of former British government minister John Profumo and actress Valerie Hobson. He succeeded his father as the 6th Baron Profumo, but like his father does not use the title, which is of Italian origin.
He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was Assistant Master of English at Eton College, Windsor in 1978 and at the Royal School, Shrewsbury from 1978 to 1979. He then became part-time lecturer of English at King's College, London from 1981 to 1983 and Deputy Editor of Fiction Magazine from 1982 to 1984. He was a columnist for the Daily Telegraph from 1987 to 1995.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1995
He married Helen Fraser, daughter of Alasdair Fraser, on 22 March 1979 at St. Marylebone Church, Marylebone, London. His son and heir is Alexander James Profumo.
His recent book Bringing the House Down, covered the scandal brought about by his father's affair with Christine Keeler.

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David Pryce-Jones
David Eugene Henry Pryce-Jones FRSL (b. 15 February 1936 Vienna, Austria) is a conservative British author and commentator.
He was educated at Eton and read History at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied under A.J.P. Taylor.
He did his National Service in the Coldstream Guards, in which he was commissioned in 1955, promoted Lieutenant in 1956, and served in the British Army of the Rhine. In 1956, Pryce-Jones lectured the men under his command about the necessity of the Suez War, but admits that he did not believe what he was saying. At the time, he believed that the Islamic world would soon progress after decolonization, and was disappointed when this did not happen. He has worked as a journalist and author. He was Literary Editor at the Financial Times 1959-61, and The Spectator from 1961-63.
Pryce-Jones currently works as senior editor at National Review magazine. He also contributes to The New Criterion and Commentary, and for Benador Associates. Pryce-Jones often writes about the contemporary events and the history of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and intelligence matters.

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Dea Birkett
Dea Birkett (born 1958) is a British writer, journalist, broadcaster and a former circus performer. She has written on social issues for The Guardian and broadcasts for BBC Radio 4. She is director of the charity Kids in Museums.
She was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award in 1993 for Jella.

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Denis Mack Smith
Denis Mack Smith CBE FBA FRSL (born 3 March 1920 in London) is an English historian, specialising in the history of Italy from the Risorgimento onwards. He is best known for studies of Garibaldi and Cavour and of Mussolini, and for his single-volume Modern Italy: A Political History. He was named Grand Official of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1996.

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Diana Athill
Diana Athill OBE (born December 21, 1917 aged 94) is a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the most important writers of the 20th century.
Athill graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1939 and worked for the BBC throughout the Second World War. After it she helped André Deutsch establish his publishing company and worked closely with many of his authors, including Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Mordecai Richler, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Rhys, Gitta Sereny, Brian Moore, V. S. Naipaul, Charles Gidley Wheeler and David Gurr.
She retired in 1993 at the age of 75, after more than 50 years in publishing. She continues to influence the publishing world through her revealing memoirs about her editorial career. She is best known for her books of memoirs (these were not written in chronological order, Yesterday Morning being the account of her childhood), and has also translated various works from French.
She appeared on Desert Island Discs at the age of 86 and selected a recording of Haydn's The Creation as the most valued of the eight records and Thackeray's Vanity Fair as the book.

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Dick Davis
Richard Earl Davis is a former professional baseball player. He played all or part of six seasons in Major League Baseball from 1977 until 1982, primarily as an outfielder. He also played five seasons in Japan with the Kintetsu Buffaloes from 1984 until 1988.
Davis was signed as an amateur free agent by the Milwaukee Brewers in 1972. After several years in the minors, he was called up to the Brewers in July 1977. He split time in the outfield and as a designated hitter for the next four seasons, being used at DH more often than any other Brewer between 1978 and 1980.
During spring training in 1981, the Brewers traded Davis to the Philadelphia Phillies for pitcher Randy Lerch. Davis played some right field and also came off the bench as a pinch hitter 20 times. Though Davis missed most of July and August with an injury, he did hit .333 with 19 RBI in just 96 at bats. Davis continued in the same role to start the 1982 season, but would soon be on the move again.
In June 1982, Davis would be traded not once, but twice, each time for the same player. At the June 15 trading deadline, the Phillies first traded him to the Toronto Blue Jays for outfielder Wayne Nordhagen. While the Phillies sent Nordhagen on to the Pittsburgh Pirates on the same day in exchange for another outfielder, Bill Robinson, Davis stayed in Toronto for an entire week, appearing in 3 games and going 2-for-7 at the plate. On June 22, the Blue Jays traded Davis to the Pirates for a player to be named later. On June 25, the Pirates sent a player to the Blue Jays—and it was Wayne Nordhagen.

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Diran Adebayo
Diran Adebayo is a British novelist, cultural critic and broadcaster best known for his vivid portrayals of modern London life and his distinctive use of language.
Born in London in 1968, Adebayo won a major scholarship to Malvern College where he boarded as an adolescent, and is an Oxford University Law graduate.
His debut novel, Some Kind of Black, was one of the first to articulate a British-born African perspective, and it won him numerous awards, including the Writers Guild of Great Britain's New Writer of the Year Award, the Author's Club First Novel Award, the 1996 Saga Prize, and a Betty Trask Award. It was also longlisted for the Booker Prize, serialised on British Radio and is now a Virago Modern Classic. His follow-up, the neo-noir fable My Once Upon A Time, which he's described as a 'latter day Pilgrim's Progress', fused film noir and fairytale with Yoruba myth to striking effect, and solidified his reputation as a groundbreaker. In 2004 he co-edited 'New Writing 12', the British Council's annual anthology of British and Commonwealth literature, with Blake Morrison and Jane Rogers. In 2009, he donated the short story Calculus to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Adebayo's story was published in the 'Air' collection.

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Dominic Hibberd
Dominic Hibberd is an English biographer, best known for his biographies of the poets Wilfred Owen and Harold Monro. He was formerly a teacher at Manchester Grammar School.

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Don Paterson
Don Paterson, OBE, FRSL (born 1963) is a Scottish poet, writer and musician.
Paterson was born in Dundee. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990 and his poem A Private Bottling won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition in 1993. He was included on the list of 20 poets chosen for the Poetry Society's 'New Generation Poets' promotion in 1994. In 2002 he was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award.
His first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. God's Gift to Women (1997) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. The Eyes, adaptations of the work of Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939), was published in 1999. He is also editor of 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney (1999) and of Last Words: New Poetry for the New Century (1999) with Jo Shapcott. His collection of poems, Landing Light (2003), won both the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award. He has also published three collections of aphorisms, The Book of Shadows (2004), The Blind Eye (2007) and Best Thought, Worst Thought (2008). Orpheus, his version of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus, was published in 2006.

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Donald Adamson
Donald Adamson (born 30 March 1939 at Culcheth, Lancashire, now Cheshire) is a historian, biographer, philosophical writer, textual scholar, literary critic, and translator of French literature. The books he has written include "Blaise Pascal: Mathematician, Physicist and Thinker about God", and more recently "The Curriers' Company: A Modern History".
Adamson, elder son of Donald Adamson, a farmer, was born at Culcheth in 1939. He was brought up at Lymm, Cheshire, the county in which his mother's family has been resident for upwards of 500 years. From 1949 to 1956, he attended Manchester Grammar School, before becoming a Scholar of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1959, proceeding M.A. in 1963. He was Zaharoff Travelling Scholar of the University of Oxford in 1959-1960. In 1962 he took the degree of B.Litt. (proceeding Master of Letters). Prior to graduating B.Litt. he had the privilege of studying under Pierre-Georges Castex at the University of Paris. His thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.), entitled "Balzac and the Visual Arts", was supervised by Jean Seznec of All Souls College, Oxford.

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Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a Zimbabwean-British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos.
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In doing so the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest ever person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Lessing was born in Iran, then known as Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), who were both English and of British nationality. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation. Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was here that Doris was born in 1919. The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize, among other plants, when her father purchased around one thousand acres of bush. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian lifestyle amidst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; in reality, such a lifestyle was not feasible. The farm failed to deliver any monetary value in return .

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Drue Heinz
Drue Heinz, born Doreen Mary English, is a prominent patron of the literary arts in the United States.
She is the publisher of the famous literary magazine The Paris Review, which was started in 1953 by Peter Matthiessen, Thomas H. Guinzburg, and Harold L. Humes, and edited until his death in 2003 by George Plimpton. Its first publisher was Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan.
Heinz also established the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Since 1981 it has recognized, through book publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press, outstanding collections of short fiction. She is the sponsor of The Royal Oak Foundation's Drue Heinz Lecture Series.
She has also endowed a chair jointly held at St. John's College, Oxford and the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford called the Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature. She also sponsors the Drue Heinz Lectures in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Drue Heinz Study Center for Drawings and Prints at the National Design Museum. She inspired the creation of Heinz Hall Plaza in Pittsburgh and chose the sculpture there. Funds from her foundation generate exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art's Heinz Architectural Center and help publish the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

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Edward Lucie-Smith
John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith (born 27 February 1933) is a British writer, poet, art critic, curator, broadcaster and author of exhibition catalogues.
Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946. He studied at The King's School, Canterbury, and after a little time in Paris he also studied at Merton College, Oxford.
After serving in the Royal Air Force and working as a copywriter, he became a full-time writer. He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group.
At the beginning of the 1980s he conducted several series of interviews, Conversations with Artists, for BBC Radio 3.

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Edward Mendelson
Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of a book about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006).
He has edited standard editions of works by W. H. Auden, including Collected Poems (1976; 2nd edn. 1990; 3rd edn., 2007), The English Auden (1977), Selected Poems (1979, 2nd edn., 2007), As I Walked Out One Evening (selected light verse, 1995), and the continuing Complete Works of W. H. Auden (1986– ).
His work on Thomas Pynchon includes Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978) and numerous essays, including "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49 (1975; reprinted in the 1978 collection) and "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. by David Leverenz and George Levine, 1976). The latter essay introduced the critical category of "encyclopedic narrative, further elaborated in a later essay, "Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon" (MLN, vol. 91, 1976).

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Edward Upward
Edward Falaise Upward (9 September 1903 – 13 February 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer and, prior to his death, was believed to be the UK's oldest living author.
Upward was educated at Repton School, where he became a friend of Christopher Isherwood. As an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge he won the Chancellor's Medal for English Verse in 1924. He was part of a group of writers including Isherwood (with whom he created the surreal world of the Mortmere stories), W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.
After graduation Upward worked in various teaching jobs, and in 1932 took up a post at Alleyn's School, Dulwich where he was to remain for nearly thirty years. He joined the Communist Party that year and remained committed to internationalism and socialism, although he and his wife Hilda left the Communist Party in 1948, believing its policies in Britain were no longer revolutionary.
Upward's first novel, Journey to the Border, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1938. It describes in poetic prose the rebellion of a private tutor against his employer and the menacing world of the 1930s, moving from a nightmarish state to one where he recognizes that he must join the workers' movement.

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Edwin Morgan (poet)
Edwin George Morgan FRSE OBE (27 April 1920 – 17 August 2010) was a Scottish poet and translator who was associated with the Scottish Renaissance. He is widely recognised as one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century. In 1999, Morgan was made the first Glasgow Poet Laureate. In 2004, he was named as the first Scottish national poet: The Scots Makar.
Morgan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Rutherglen. His parents were Presbyterian. As a child he was not surrounded by books, nor did he have any literary acquaintances. Schoolmates labelled him a swot. He convinced his parents to finance his membership of several book clubs in Glasgow. The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) was a "revelation" to him, he later said.
Morgan entered the University of Glasgow in 1937. It was at university that he studied French and Russian, while self-educating in "a good bit of Italian and German" as well. After interrupting his studies to serve in World War II as a non-combatant conscientious objector with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Morgan graduated in 1947 and became a lecturer at the University. He worked there until his retirement in 1980.

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Elaine Feinstein
Elaine Feinstein (born 24 October 1930, Bootle, Lancashire) is a poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator.
Born in Bootle, Liverpool, Feinstein grew up in Leicester. Her father left school at 12 and had little time for books, but was a great storyteller. He ran a small factory making wooden furniture through the 1930s. She writes "An inner certainty of being loved and valued went a long way to create my own sense of resilience in later years spent in a world that felt altogether alien. I never altogether lost my childhood sense of being fortunate. Feinstein was sent to Wyggeston Grammar School by her mother "a school as good as Leicester could provide". She wrote poems from the age of 8, which were published in the school magazine. At the end of the war Feinstein's sense of childhood security was shattered by the revelations of the Nazi extermination camps. She notes "In that year I became Jewish for the first time".
Feinstein excelled at school work from this point. She was educated at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. After Cambridge she read for the bar, worked at Hockerill Training College, then as a university lecturer at the University of Essex (1967–70),appointed by Donald Davie.

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Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.
She is well known and respected in both academic and popular cultural fields.^{[citation needed]} She has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.
Born Elaine Cottler in Boston, Massachusetts, Showalter pursued an academic career against the wishes of her parents. She earned a bachelor's degree at Bryn Mawr College, a master's degree at Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in 1970 at the University of California, Davis. Her first academic appointment was at Douglass College at Rutgers University. She joined Princeton University's faculty in 1984, and took early retirement in 2003.

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Emma Tennant
Emma Christina Tennant FRSL (born 20 October 1937) is a British novelist and editor. She is known for a postmodern approach to her fiction, which is often imbued with fantasy or magic. Several of her novels give a feminist or dreamlike twist to classic stories, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Tennant is of Scottish extraction, the daughter of Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner and Elizabeth Lady Glenconner. She is the niece of Edward Wyndham Tennant and Stephen Tennant, and the sister of Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner.
Born in London, she was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and spent the World War II years and her childhood summers at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her family also owned estates in Trinidad. Tennant remembers her father as a mix of rage and benevolence, and these memories may have influenced her fiction.
Tennant grew up in the modish London of the 1950s and 1960s. She worked as a travel writer for Queen magazine and an editor for Vogue, publishing her first novel, The Colour of Rain, under a pseudonym when she was twenty-six. Between 1975 and 1979, she edited a literary magazine, Bananas, which helped launch the careers of several young novelists.

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Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, CH, FBA, FRSL (born 9 June 1917) is a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author. His best known works include the trilogy about the long 19th century: The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875-1914; and an edited volume which introduced the influential idea of 'invented traditions'.
Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Leopold Percy Obstbaum and Nelly Grün, both Jewish, and he grew up in Vienna, Austria and Berlin, Germany. A clerical error at birth altered his surname from Obstbaum to Hobsbawm. Although the family lived in German-speaking countries, his parents spoke to him and his younger sister Nancy in English.
His father died in 1929, and he started working as an au pair and English tutor. He became an orphan at age 14 upon the death of his mother. Subsequently, he and Nancy were adopted by his maternal aunt, Gretl, and paternal uncle, Sidney, who married and had a son named Peter. Hobsbawm was a schoolboy in Berlin when Hitler came to power in 1933; that year the family moved to London where he attended St Marylebone Grammar School.

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Eva Hoffman
'Eva Hoffman (born Ewa Wydra', [Cracow]], Poland) is a writer and academic.
She was born in Poland after her Jewish parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Ukraine. In 1959, she emigrated to Vancouver, Canada, with her parents and sister to Vancouver, Canada, where her name was changed to Eva. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University, Texas, the Yale School of Music, and Harvard University, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1975.
Eva Hoffmann has been a professor of literature and creative writing at various institutions, such as Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, Tufts, and CUNY's Hunter College. From 1979 to 1990, she worked as an editor and writer at The New York Times, serving as senior editor of “The Book Review” from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, she received the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship for General Nonfiction, as well as the Whiting Writers' Award. In 2000, Eva Hoffman was the Year 2000 Una Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick. She has presented radio programmes and is the recipient of the Prix Italia for radio.

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Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon CBE (born 22 September 1931) is an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrays contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of British society.
Weldon was born in Birmingham, England to a literary family, with both her maternal grandfather, Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), and her mother Margaret writing novels (the latter under the nom de plume Pearl Bellairs, alter-ego of the eponymous character in Aldous Huxley's short story, "Farcical History of Richard Greenow"). Weldon spent her early years in Auckland, New Zealand, where her father worked as a doctor. At the age of 14, after her parents' divorce, she returned to England with her mother and her sister Jane – never to see her father again. While in England she attended South Hampstead High School.
She studied psychology and economics at St Andrews, Scotland but returned to London after giving birth to a son. Soon afterwards she married her first husband, Ronald Bateman, who was a headmaster 25 years her senior and not the natural father of her child, and moved to Acton, London. She left him after two years, and the marriage ended.

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Ferdinand Mount
Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet (born 2 July 1939), usually known as Ferdinand Mount, is a British writer and novelist, columnist for The Sunday Times and commentator on politics, and Conservative Party politician. He was head of the policy unit in 10 Downing Street in 1982-83, during the time when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and wrote the 1983 Tory general election manifesto. He is regarded as being on the One Nation or 'wet' wing of the party.
He attended Greenways Prep School in Wiltshire, and was later educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1993 he succeeded his uncle as 3rd Baronet, but he does not use the title.
For 11 years (1991-2002) he was editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He then became a regular contributor to Standpoint magazine. He wrote for The Sunday Times, and in 2005 joined The Daily Telegraph as a commentator.
He has written novels, including a six-volume novel sequence Chronicle of Modern Twilight centred on a low-key character Gus Cotton; the title alludes to the sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight by Henry Williamson, and another sequence entitled Tales of History and Imagination.

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Fiona MacCarthy
Fiona MacCarthy OBE (born 1940) is a British biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th and 20th century arts, crafts and design.
MacCarthy was born into a family of wealth and privilege; her father died when she was an infant. She spent her early childhood in London. Her mother was a McAlpine, so, during the Blitz, they sheltered at the Dorchester, the famous hotel built by that family. She was educated at Wycombe Abbey School. In 1958, the final year of this social ceremony, she was presented to the Queen, an experience she recounts in her 2007 memoir, Last Curtsey: the End of the Debutantes. She was one of only four of this cohort to go on to university, in her case taking a degree in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
MacCarthy is well known for her arts essays and reviews, appearing regularly in The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. She contributes frequently to TV and radio arts programmes.
She married the designer David Mellor in 1966 and they had two children, Corin and Clare. The family lived in Sheffield, a centre of industrial design. She was widowed in May 2009.

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Fiona Sampson
Fiona Sampson (born 1968) is an award-winning British poet. She was the editor of Poetry Review (2005-2012).
Born in London, Sampson grew up in the West Country, on the west coast of Wales and in Gloucestershire. She was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, and following a brief career as a concert violinist, studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize. She gained a PhD in the philosophy of language from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and currently lives in London.
Sampson has published fifteen books, including works of poetry, volumes on the philosophy of language and on the writing process. Her poetry has been published and broadcast in more than thirty languages and her many translations include the work of Jaan Kaplinski. She contributes to The Guardian, The Irish Times The Independent, the Times Literary Supplement and the "Sunday Times". She advises internationally on creative writing in healthcare. She was the founder-director of Poetryfest - the Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival and the founding editor of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from Europe. Sampson's work is held online, in text and audio, at The Poetry Archive.

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Fleur Adcock
Kareen Fleur Adcock (known as Fleur Adcock), CNZM, OBE (born 10 February 1934 in New Zealand) is a poet and an editor of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England.
Adcock was born in Auckland, but spent the years between 1939 and 1947 in England. Her sister is the novelist Marilyn Duckworth. She studied Classics at the Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with a M.A.. She worked as an assistant lecturer and later an assistant librarian at the University of Otago in Dunedin until 1962. She was married to two famous New Zealand literary personalities. In 1952 she married Alistair Campbell, (divorced 1958). Then in 1962 she married Barry Crump, divorcing in 1963.
In 1963, Adcock returned to England and took up a post as an assistant librarian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London until 1979. Since then she has been a freelance writer, living in East Finchley, north London. She has held several literary fellowships, including the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship in Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham in 1979-81.

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Frances Spalding
Frances Spalding CBE, FRSL (born 1950) is a British art historian and writer.
She studied at Nottingham University and gained her PhD for a study of Roger Fry. She taught art history at Sheffield City Polytechnic before becoming a freelance writer and curator. She returned to academic work to take up the post of Professor of Art History at Newcastle University.
She specializes in 20th-century British art, biography and cultural history and her work includes 15 major books, essays, criticism and reviews. She curated the 2003 exhibition John Piper in the 1930s: Abstraction on the Beach at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London.
She has also written a study of poet Stevie Smith.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 She was awarded a CBE in the Birthday Honours 2005 for services to literature.
She is a trustee of the Charleston Trust.

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Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford FRSL (born 1964) is an English author.
He studied English Literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, gaining a BA in 1985.
He was Chief Publisher's Reader from 1987-90 for Chatto & Windus.
Spufford was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007, and since 2008 has taught at Goldsmiths College in London on the MA in Creative and Life Writing there.
Spufford specializes in works of non-fiction.
He has also edited two volumes of polar literature.
His newest book is Red Plenty, published in August 2010. In March 2011 it was longlisted for the Orwell Prize. Translations into Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Polish and German have appeared, and versions in Italian, Russian and Turkish are following.
He lives just outside Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Frederic Raphael
Frederic Michael Raphael (born August 14, 1931) is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter, and also a prolific novelist and journalist.
Raphael was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Irene Rose (née Mauser) and Cedric Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Co. With his parents, he emigrated to Putney, England, in 1938.
Raphael was educated at two independent schools, Copthorne Preparatory School, near Crawley in West Sussex, and Charterhouse School (Lockites) in Godalming in Surrey, and then at St John's College at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge.
Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd directed by John Schlesinger.
His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times. He has published more than twenty novels, the best-known being the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976), which traces the lives of a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in post-war Britain as they move through university and into the wider world. The original six-part BBC television series, from which the book was adapted, won him a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award.Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, television channels having refused to commission the sequel themselves. In 2010, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a further sequel in a series entitled Final Demands, with Tom Conti as Adam Morris, the central character, bringing the story to the late 1990s.

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Gabriel Josipovici
Gabriel David Josipovici FBA, FRSL (born 8 October 1940) is a British novelist, short story writer, critic, literary theorist, and playwright.
He was born in Nice, France in 1940, of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine Jewish parents. He lived out the war years in a village in the French Alps with his mother,Sacha Rabinovitz. He studied for six years in Egypt at Victoria College, Cairo from 1950–56, before emigrating with his mother to England and finishing his high school education at Cheltenham College, Gloucestershire. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. Gabriel Josipovici taught at the University of Sussex at Brighton from 1963 until 1998, where he is Research Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities. He was formerly Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. Josipovici has published over a dozen novels, three volumes of short stories and a number of critical books. Carcanet Press have published his work since his novel Contre Jour in 1986. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in France and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic. In 2001 he published A Life, a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch. In 2007, Gabriel Josipovici gave the University of London Coffin Lecture on Literature; the lecture was entitled "What ever happened to Modernism?" and was subsequently published by Yale University Press.

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Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer (born 5 June 1958) is a British author and novelist. He is also a journalist who writes about a wide range of topics. His published work includes four novels and several books of non-fiction, which have won a number of literary awards. But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz (1991) first brought Dyer's name to the attention of a wider audience, as it appeared in various translations.
Dyer currently resides in London. He was raised in Cheltenham as the only child of a sheet-metal worker father and a cafeteria lady mother. In his writings Dyer often describes himself as a 'scholarship boy.' He obtained a scholarship to study English at Oxford. He is married to Rebecca Wilson, a director at the Saatchi Gallery, London. Geoff Dyer did his schooling at Cheltenham and went on to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he obtained a Bachelor's in English literature. However, in his essay On the Roof he states that while living on the dole in Brixton in the early '80s, his 'quality of study was much higher' than at Oxford.

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Geoffrey Ashe
Geoffrey Thomas Leslie Ashe MBE (born 29 March 1923) is a British cultural historian, a writer of non-fiction books and novels.
Born in London, Ashe spent several years in Canada growing up, graduating from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, before continuing at Cambridge.
Many of his historical books are centered on factual analysis of the Arthurian legend, and the archaeological past of King Arthur, beginning with his King Arthur's Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury, in 1957. The book was inspired by what Ashe had read in G. K. Chesterton's Short History of England.
He is a major proponent of the theories that the historical King Arthur was Riothamus, presented in an article in Speculum, April 1981, and expanded in The Discovery of King Arthur (1985), The Landscape of King Arthur (1987), and in various further articles. His fresh idea was to scrutinize Arthur's foreign campaigns in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account and take the material seriously, concluding that, though the legendary Arthur is a composite figure, the career of Riothamus seems to underlie at least a major portion of Geoffrey's account, for which Ashe adduces passages in a Breton text and several chronicles.

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George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council.

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George Steiner
Francis George Steiner,FBA (born April 23, 1929), is an influentialEuropean-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator. He has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust. An article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath", saying that he is "often credited with recasting the role of the critic".
Among his admirers, Steiner is ranked "among the great minds in today's literary world."English novelist A. S. Byatt described him as a "late, late, late Renaissance man ... a European metaphysician with an instinct for the driving ideas of our time." Harriet Harvey-Wood, a former literature director of the British Council, saw him as a "magnificent lecturer – prophetic and doom-laden [who would] turn up with half a page of scribbled notes, and never refer to them."
Steiner was Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva (1974–1994), Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow at the University of Oxford (1994–1995) and Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (2001–2002).

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George Szirtes
George Szirtes (

/ˈsɪərtɛʃ/; born 29 November 1948) is a Hungarian-born British poet, writing in English, as well as a translator from the Hungarian language into English. He has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life.
Born in Budapest on 29 November 1948, Szirtes came to England as a refugee in 1956 aged 8. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds.
His poems began appearing in national magazines in 1973 and his first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize the following year.
He has won a variety of prizes for his work, most recently the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize, for his collection Reel and the Bess Hokin Prize for poems in Poetry magazine, 2008. His translations from Hungarian poetry, fiction and drama have also won numerous awards.
Szirtes lives in Wymondham, Norfolk, and teaches at the University of East Anglia. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he ran The Starwheel Press and who has been responsible for most of his book jacket images. Her interest in the city of Budapest has led to over twenty years of exploration of the city, its streets, buildings and courtyards in paintings and drawings.

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Gillian Beer
Dame Gillian Beer, DBE (born 27 January 1935), King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, is a British literary critic and academic.
Born as Gillian Patricia Kempster Thomas in Surrey, England, She studied English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.
She was a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, for 30 years. She was later King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, and later President of Clare Hall. She served as chair of the judges for the Booker Prize in 1997.
Her most intensive literary criticism lies in the field of Victorian studies. Darwin's Plots (1983), in particular, related the form of Victorian novels to Darwinist thinking. Its significance as a work was confirmed by the publication of second edition by Cambridge University Press in 2000. She has also written important collections of essays on Virginia Woolf (The Common Ground, 1996) and on other aspects of the relations of literature and science.^{[citation needed]}

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Gillian Clarke
Gillian Clarke (born 8 June 1937) is a Welsh poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator from Welsh.
Clarke was born in Cardiff and brought up in Cardiff and Penarth, though for part of the Second World War she was in Pembrokeshire. Although both of her parents were native Welsh speakers, she was brought up speaking only English, and she learnt to speak Welsh as an adult. After graduating in English from University of Wales, Cardiff, she spent a year working for the BBC in London. She then returned to Cardiff where she married and had a daughter, Catrin - about whom she has written a poem of the same name - and two sons. She worked as an English teacher, first in the Reardon-Smith Nautical College, and later in Newport College of Art. In the mid 1980s she moved to rural Ceredigion, west Wales with her second husband, after which time she spent some years as a creative writing tutor at the University of Glamorgan. Her poetry is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain. She has given poetry readings and lectures in Europe and the United States, and her work has been translated into ten languages. A considerable number of her poems are used in the GCSE AQA Anthology.

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Gillian Tindall
Gillian Tindall is a British writer. Among her better-known works are City of Gold: Biography of Bombay and Celestine: Voices from a French Village. Her novel Fly Away Home won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1972.
Since the 1970s she has lived in Kentish Town, in north London; her 1977 book The Fields Beneath is about the history of that area.
In 2006, Tindall's book The House by the Thames was published; it is about the London house 49 Bankside. Since it was built in 1710, the house has served as a home for coal merchants, an office, a boarding-house, a hangout for derelicts and once again a private residence in the 1900s. The house is listed in tour guides as a notable residence and has been variously claimed as possibly being home to Christopher Wren during the construction of St. Paul's Cathedral, and previously claimed residents included Catherine of Aragon and William Shakespeare.

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Glen Cavaliero
Glen Cavaliero is an English poet and critic. He was a staff member at Lincoln Theological College 1956-61 and is currently a member of the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. He is a Fellow Commoner of St Catharine's College, a member of the Royal Society of Literature, and the President of the Powys Society.
Criticism
Poetry
As Editor

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Glyn Maxwell
Glyn Maxwell (born in 1962) is a British poet and lecturer.
Though his parents are Welsh, Maxwell was born and raised in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. He studied English at Worcester College, Oxford. He began an MLitt there, but in 1987 moved to America to study poetry and drama with Derek Walcott at Boston University. He returned to the UK and began publishing poetry in the 1990s.
His three earliest collections of poetry, Tale Of The Mayor's Son (1990), Out of the Rain (1992), Rest For The Wicked (1995) are collected as The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (2000). The Breakage was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes.
In 1994 he was named one of the New Generation poets and he received the E. M. Forster Award in 1997. His book Time's Fool (2000) is a narrative poem written in terza rima, and is now in development as a film. His most recent collections are The Nerve (2002, winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize), The Sugar Mile (2005) and Hide Now, which was published in 2008 and shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2008 and the Forward Prize in 2009. One Thousand Nights and Counting, a selection of his poetry, was published by Picador.

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Grace Nichols
Grace Nichols is a Guyanese poet. She was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1950. After working in Guyana as a teacher and journalist, she emigrated to the UK in 1977. Much of her poetry is characterised by Caribbean rhythms and culture, and influenced by Guyanese and Amerindian folklore.
Her first collection of poetry, I is a Long-Memoried Woman won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has written several further books of poetry and a novel for adults, Whole of a Morning Sky, 1986. Her books for children include collections of short stories and poetry anthologies. Her latest work, of new and selected poems, is "Startling the Flying Fish", 2006. Her poetry is featured in the AQA, WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee), and Edexcel English/English Literature GCSE anthologies - meaning that many GCSE students in the UK have studied her work. Her religion is Christianity after she was influenced by the UK's many religions and multi-cultural society. Her partner is Guyanese poet John Agard.

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Graham Swift
Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born May 4, 1949) is a British author. He was born in London, England and educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. He was a friend of Ted Hughes
Some of his works have been made into films, including Last Orders, which starred Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland which starred Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was a joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the Booker Prize in 1996, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland was set in The Fens; it is a novel of landscape, history and family, and is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English Literature syllabus in British schools.

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Grey Gowrie
Alexander Patrick Greysteil Ruthven, 2nd Earl of Gowrie PC, FRSL (born 26 November 1939), usually known as Grey Gowrie, was a Conservative Party politician for some years, including a period in the British Cabinet, and was later Chairman of Sotheby's and of the Arts Council of England. He has also published poetry. Lord Gowrie is the hereditary Clan Chief of Clan Ruthven.
Ruthven was born in Ireland, the elder son of Major the Honourable Patrick Hore-Ruthven, only surviving son of the 1st Baron Gowrie and his wife Lady Gowrie. His mother was Pamela Margaret Fletcher (who later married Major Derek Cooper. His younger brother is Malise Ruthven. His father was killed in action in 1942, at which point he became his grandfather's heir apparent. When his grandfather was created Earl of Gowrie in 1945 he became known by the courtesy title Viscount Ruthven of Canberra. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and later at Harvard University. He succeeded in the earldom of Gowrie on the death of his grandfather on 2 May 1955, and also succeeded his great-uncle (his grandfather's elder brother) the 10th Lord Ruthven of Freeland as 3rd Baron Ruthven of Gowrie on 16 April 1956 (the Scottish lordship of Ruthven of Freeland passed instead via the female line). Lord Gowrie inherited Castlemartin House and Estate at Kilcullen, County Kildare, Ireland, from his great-aunt Sheelagh Blacker in 1967, and later sold it to Tony O'Reilly.

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Günter Grass
Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) is a German-Kashubian novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is widely regarded as Germany's most famous living writer.
Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). In 1945, he came to West Germany as a homeless refugee, though in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood.
Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism, and the first part of his Danzig Trilogy, which also includes Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Tin Drum was adapted into a film, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Swedish Academy, upon awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature, noted him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".

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Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi CBE (born December 5, 1954) is an English playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker, novelist and short story writer. The themes of his work have touched on topics of race, nationalism, immigration, and sexuality. In 2008, The Times included Kureishi in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Kureishi was born in Kent to a Pakistani father and an English mother (Audrey Buss). His father, Rafiushan, was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of British India in 1947. After his parents married, the family settled in Bromley where Kureishi was born.
He attended Bromley Technical High School and studied for A levels at Bromley College of Technology. While at this college he was elected as Student Union President (1972) and some of the characters from his semi-autobiographical work "The Buddha of Suburbia" are from this period. He went on to spend a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University before dropping out. Later he attended King's College London and took a degree in philosophy.

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Helen Dunmore
Helen Dunmore (born 12 December 1952) is a British poet, novelist and children's writer. Educated at the University of York, she now lives in Bristol. She has won awards for her fiction (the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize and the Orange Prize) and also for her poetry (she has won the Cardiff International Poetry Prize, been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and had her books named as Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations). Dunmore is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). Some of her children's books are now included in reading schemes for use in schools.

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Henry Hallam
Henry Hallam (9 July 1777 – 21 January 1859) was an English historian.
The only son of John Hallam, canon of Windsor and dean of Bristol, Henry Hallam was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1799. Called to the bar, he practised for some years on the Oxford circuit; but his tastes were literary, and when, on his father's death in 1812, he inherited a small estate in Lincolnshire, he gave himself up to study. He had become connected with the brilliant band of authors and politicians who led the Whig party, a connection to which he owed his appointment to the well-paid and easy post of commissioner of stamps; but took no part in politics himself. He was, however, an active supporter of many popular movements—particularly of that which ended in the abolition of the slave trade; and he was attached to the political principles of the Whigs.
Hallam's earliest literary work was undertaken in connection with the Whig periodical, the Edinburgh Review, where his review of Walter Scott's Dryden attracted attention. His first major work, The View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, was produced in 1818, and was followed nine years later by the Constitutional History of England. In 1838–1839 appeared the Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries. A volume of supplemental notes to his Middle Ages was published in 1843; these facts and dates represent nearly all of Hallam's career.

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Hermione Lee
Hermione Lee, CBE FBA FRSL (born 29 February 1948) is President of Wolfson College, Oxford and was lately Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Hermione Lee grew up in London where her father was a GP. She was educated at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, City of London School for Girls, and Queen's College, London. She took a first-class degree in English Literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1968 and an MPhil at St Cross College, Oxford in 1970. She has taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, at the University of Liverpool (where she was given an Honorary DLitt in 2002) and at the University of York, from 1977 to 1998, where she had a personal Chair in the Department of English and Related Literature, and where she received an Honorary DLitt in 2007. Since 1998 she has been the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and the first woman professorial Fellow of New College, Oxford.

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Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mary Mantel CBE (/mænˈtɛl/ man-TEL; born 6 July 1952), née Thompson, is an English novelist, short story writer and critic. Her work, ranging in subject from personal memoir to historical fiction, has been short-listed for major literary awards. In 2009, she won the Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall.
She was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children, and was brought up in the Derbyshire mill village of Hadfield, attending the local Roman Catholic primary school. Her parents, Margaret and Henry Thompson, were both born in England, of Irish descent. Her parents separated and she did not see her father after age eleven. Jack Mantel moved in and became her unofficial stepfather and she took his surname. Her family background, the mainspring of much of her fiction, is explained in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. She lost her religious faith at age 12 and says that this left a permanent mark on her: the "real cliche, the sense of guilt. You grow up believing that you're wrong and bad. And for me, because I took what I was told really seriously, it bred a very intense habit of introspection and self-examination and a terrible severity with myself. So that nothing was ever good enough. It's like installing a policeman, and one moreover who keeps changing the law."

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Hilary Spurling
Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL (born 25 December 25 1940) is a British writer, known as a journalist and biographer. She won the Whitbread Prize for the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse in January 2006. Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China was published in March 2010.
She is married to playwright John Spurling, and has three children (Amy, Nathaniel and Gilbert) and six grandchildren.
Spurling was educated at Clifton High School, an independent school in Bristol in South West England, followed by the University of Oxford.

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Hugh Brogan
Denis Hugh Vercingetorix Brogan (born 20 March 1936), known as Hugh Brogan, is a British historian and biographer.
The son of Sir Denis Brogan, he was educated at St Faith's School, Cambridge, Repton School, and St John's College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1959 and MA in 1964. As a young man he was apparently interested in Hobbits, as evidenced by a letter in reply to him from J.R.R. Tolkien, dated 7 April 1948.
Brogan was on the staff of The Economist from 1960 to 1963, and was elected a Harkness Fellow in 1962, then was a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, from 1963 to 1974. He was then part of the department of history at the University of Essex from 1974 to 1998, first as a lecturer, then a reader, and finally as Professor of History from 1992 to 1998.

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Hugh Honour
Hugh Honour FRSL (born 26 September 1927) is a British art historian, famous for his writings. His A World History of Art, co-authored with John Fleming, is now in its seventh edition; his Chinoiserie (1961) first set the phenomenon of chinoiserie in its European cultural context, and his overview of Neoclassicism (Neo-Classicism, 1968) is still (2007) "an introduction that remains unsurpassed".
Honour was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, England to Herbert and Dorothy (Withers) Honour. He received a Bachelor of Arts from St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, Honour met John Fleming, a solicitor and amateur art historian, who would become Honour's life partner. Honour accepted a position as Assistant director of Leeds City Art Gallery and Temple Newsan House but left after one year to join Fleming in Italy. Living in Asolo near Venice, Honour produced his first book, a cultural guide to Venice. The pair were then commissioned by publisher Allen Lane to edit the Style and Civilisation series (begun 1967), for which Honour wrote the volumes on Neo-classicism and romanticism; the Architect and Society series (begun 1966); and the Art in Context series (begun 1972).

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Hugh Thomas
Hugh Swynnerton Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton (born 21 October 1931 in Windsor), is a British historian and writer of Welsh origin .
Thomas was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset before taking a BA in 1953 at Queens' College, Cambridge, he was a major scholar and he is now a Honorary Fellow. He gained a First Class in Part I of the History Tripos in 1952 and was President of the Union in 1953. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. His 1961 book The Spanish Civil War won the Somerset Maugham Award for 1962. A significantly revised and enlarged third edition was published in 1977. Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (1971) is a book of over 1,500 pages tracing the history of Cuba from Spanish colonial rule until the Cuban Revolution.
Thomas is married to the former Vanessa Jebb, a painter and daughter of the first Acting United Nations Secretary-General Gladwyn Jebb, and ambassador in Paris. They have three children.
From 1954–1957, Thomas worked in the Foreign Office partly as secretary of the British Delegation to the sub-committee of the UN disarmament commission. From 1966 to 1975, he was Professor of History at the University of Reading, and Chairman of the European committee. He was then Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies in London from 1979 to 1991, which worked for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He became a life peer as Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, of Notting Hill in Greater London in letters patent dated 16 June 1981.

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Hugh Whitemore
Hugh Whitemore (born 1936) is an English playwright and screenwriter.
Whitemore studied for the stage at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he is now a Member of the Council. He began his writing career in British television with both original teleplays and adaptations of classic works by Charles Dickens, W. Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, and Charlotte Brontë, among others, and twice won a Writers' Guild of Great Britain award. His work for American TV includes Concealed Enemies, about the Alger Hiss case, and The Gathering Storm, which focused on a troubled period in the marriage of Clementine and Winston Churchill just prior to World War II. He won an Emmy Award for each. He also was nominated for his adaptation of the Carl Bernstein/Bob Woodward book about President Nixon, The Final Days. His most recent teleplay was My House in Umbria (2003), an adaptation of the novella by William Trevor starring Maggie Smith.
Whitemore's film credits include: Man at the Top (1973), All Creatures Great and Small (1975), The Blue Bird (1976), The Return of the Soldier (1982), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), and Utz (1992).

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Hugo Williams
Hugo Williams (born Hugh Anthony Mordaunt Vyner Williams 20 February 1942) is a British poet, journalist and travel writer.
Williams is the son of actor Hugh Williams and the model and actress Margaret Vyner, who co-wrote some upper-middle-class comedies in the late 1950s. They are best known as co-authors of the play and film The Grass Is Greener. His brother is the actor Simon Williams, and his sister Polly was married to the actor Nigel Havers until her death from cancer at the age of 54.
Williams attended Eton College. He is a regular contributor to the "Freelance" column in the Times Literary Supplement and is poetry editor for The Spectator. Williams has been poetry editor and TV critic for the New Statesman, theatre critic for the Sunday Correspondent, film critic for Harper's & Queen and a writer on popular music for Punch.
Williams is married to singer and writer Hermine Demoriane. They have a daughter, Murphy Williams, who is also a writer and columnist.
This list may also include some poetry books:

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Iain Banks
Iain Banks (born on 16 February 1954 in Dunfermline, Fife) is a Scottish writer. He writes mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was a professional ice skater. Banks studied English, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Stirling.
After attending the University of Stirling, Banks moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.
Banks met his future wife Annie in London, before the 1984 release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1992. It was announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. Annie died in 2009, two months after their divorce had become final. Banks currently lives in North Queensferry, a village on the north side of the Firth of Forth, with the published author and founder of the Dead by Dawn film festival Adèle Hartley. The two have been together since 2006.

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Ian Duhig
Robert Ian Duhig (born 9 February 1954 London) is a British poet.
He was the eighth of eleven children born to Irish parents. He graduated from Leeds University.
He worked for 15 years with homeless people.
He is a writer and teacher of creating writing at various institutions, including the Arvon Foundation.
Duhig writes occasional articles for magazines and newspapers including Moving Worlds, the Sunday Times and the Independent on Sunday. He has also worked on a variety of commissions, particularly involving music. He wrote 'In the Key of H' with the contemporary composer Christopher Fox for the Ilkley Festival, co-operating again with Fox on an insert to 'The Play of Daniel', which can be heard on Fox's DVD 'A Glimpse of Sion's Glory'. He was commissioned by the Clerks, a vocal consort specializing in pre-baroque music, to write new poems for 'Le Roman de Fauvel', which was first performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank in 2007, and enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Times when performed in that city in 2009.

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Ian Jack
Ian Jack (born 7 February 1945) is a Scottish journalist who was the editor of the literary magazine Granta from 1995 to 2007. Granta 98 "The Deep End" was the 48th issue which Jack edited and the last.
Jack was educated at Dunfermline High School. After working on several newspaper in Scotland in the 1960s, he was a journalist at The Sunday Times from 1970 to 1986, working as a reporter, editor, feature writer and foreign correspondent.
He was a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited the paper from 1991 to 1995. He left Granta at the end of May 2007 and now writes regularly for The Guardian. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
In 2009, Jack published a collection of essays and unpublished writings entitled The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. One reviewer wrote of Jack's handling of time in this book: "He is up there with a fiction writer such as Alice Munro in his grasp of its ebb and flow, his awareness that its strong but rapidly changing currents often leave us wondering not only what we can remember, but what we should."Alexander Chancellor called the book "superb", and added: "Collections of columns and newspaper articles are not usually a very good idea. They quickly become stale and dated, and one sometimes wonders what the point of them is except to deceive journalists into thinking that their ephemeral scribblings deserve some permanence. Jack is an exception to the rule."

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Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwanCBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his first two novels, and earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1997, he published Enduring Love, which was made into a film. He won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). In 2001, he published Atonement, which was made into an Oscar-winning film. This was followed by Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007) and Solar (2010). In 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize.
McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, on 21 June 1948, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet (née Moore). He spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father, a Scottish army officer, was posted. His family returned to England when he was twelve. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School; the University of Sussex, receiving his degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury's pioneering creative writing course.

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Imtiaz Dharker
Imtiaz Dharker (Born 1954) is a Scottish Muslim, poet, artist and documentary film-maker.
She was born in Lahore to Pakistani parents. She was brought up in Glasgow where her family moved when she was less than a year old. She was married to Simon Powell, the founder of the organization Poetry Live, who died in October 2009 after surviving for eleven years with cancer. Dharker divides her time between London, Wales, and Mumbai. She says she describes herself as a "Scottish Muslim Calvinist". Her daughter Ayesha Dharker, {whose father is Anil Dharker}, is a well known actress in international films, TV and stage.

As of 2010 she has written five books of poetry Purdah (1989), Postcards from God (1997), I speak for the Devil (2001), The Terrorist at my Table (2006) and Leaving Fingerprints (2009) (all self-illustrated).
She is a prescribed poet on the British AQA GCSE English syllabus. Her poems Blessing and This Room are included AQA Anthology, Different Cultures, Cluster 1 and 2 respectively.

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Isabel Colegate
Isabel Diana Colegate (born 10 September 1931) is a British author and literary agent.
She was born in Lincolnshire, the daughter of Sir Arthur and Winifred Mary Colegate, and was educated at Runton Hill School in Norfolk. She lived at Midford Castle near Bath, England, until 2007. Anthony Blond set up his own firm in 1952, Anthony Blond (London) Ltd, in partnership with Isabel Colegate.
In 1953 she married Michael Briggs, and the couple have two sons and a daughter.
Her novel The Shooting Party (1980) was adapted as an award-winning film of the same name, released in 1985 by Castle Hill Productions Inc. In 2010, it was adapted for radio by the BBC.

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J. K. Rowling
Joanne "Jo" Rowling, (

/ˈroʊlɪŋ/) OBE, FRSL (born 31 July 1965), known as J. K. Rowling, is a British novelist, best known as the author of the Harry Potter fantasy series. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies to become the best-selling book series in history and been the basis for a popular series of films, in which Rowling had overall approval on the scripts as well as maintaining creative control by serving as a producer on the final instalment. Rowling conceived the idea for the series on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990.
Rowling has led a "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on social security to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2011, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be US$1 billion. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in the United Kingdom.Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fans. In October 2010, J. K. Rowling was named 'Most Influential Woman in Britain' by leading magazine editors. She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and Lumos (formerly the Children's High Level Group).

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Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay MBE (born 1961) is a Scottish poet and novelist.
Jackie Kay was born in Glasgow in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted by a Scottish white couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow.
Kay was brought up in a 1950s-built Glasgow housing estate in a small Wimpey house, which her adoptive parents had bought new in 1957. They adopted Kay in 1961 having already adopted Jackie's brother, Maxwell, about two years earlier. Jackie and Maxwell also have siblings who were brought up by the genetic parents. Kay's adoptive father worked for the Communist Party full-time and stood for Member of Parliament, and her adoptive mother was the Scottish secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In August 2007 Kay was the subject of the fourth episode of The House I Grew Up In, in which she talked about a happy childhood in a stimulating, albeit unconventional, home.
Initially harbouring ambitions to be an actress, she decided to concentrate on writing after Alasdair Gray, a Scottish artist and writer, read her poetry and told her that writing was what she should be doing. She studied English at the University of Stirling and her first book of poetry, the partially autobiographical The Adoption Papers, was published in 1991 and won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award. Her other awards include the 1994 Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers, and the Guardian First Book Award Fiction Prize for Trumpet, based on the life of American jazz musician Billy Tipton, born Dorothy Tipton, who lived as a man for the last fifty years of her life.

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Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun (born November 30, 1907) is a French-born American historian of ideas and culture. He has written on a wide range of topics, but is perhaps best known as a philosopher of education, his Teacher in America (1945) being a strong influence on post-WWII training of schoolteachers in the United States.
Barzun was born in Créteil, France to Henri-Martin and Anna-Rose Barzun. He spent his childhood in Paris and Grenoble. His father was a member of the Abbaye de Créteil group of artists and writers and also worked in the French Ministry of Labor. His parents' Paris home was frequented by many "modernist" artists of belle epoque France, such as poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp, composer Edgard Varèse, and writers Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig. While on a diplomatic mission to the United States during the First World War, Barzun's father so liked what he saw that he decided that his son should have an American university education. Thus, Barzun was sent to the United States at age 12, first to attend a preparatory school, then Columbia University, where he obtained a broad liberal education.

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James Buchan
James Buchan, born 11 June 1954, is a British novelist and journalist.
Buchan is the son of William Buchan, 3rd Baron Tweedsmuir, and grandson of John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, the Scottish novelist and diplomat. He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, and began his career as a Financial Times correspondent, writing from the Middle East, Germany, and the United States. In 1986, he married Lady Evelyn Rose Phipps, daughter of Oswald Phipps, 4th Marquess of Normanby. He has three children, Elizabeth, Nicholas and Rose.

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James Fenton
James Martin Fenton (born 25 April 1949, Lincoln) is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Born in Lincoln, Fenton grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire, the son of Canon John Fenton, a noted biblical scholar. He was educated at the Durham Choristers School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated with a B.A. in 1970.
Fenton acquired at school an enthusiasm for the work of W.H. Auden. At Oxford John Fuller, who happened to be writing A Reader's Guide to W.H. Auden at the time, further encouraged that enthusiasm. Auden became possibly the greatest single influence on Fenton's own work.
In his first year at university Fenton won the Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence Our Western Furniture. Later published by Fuller's Sycamore Press, it largely concerns the cultural collision in the 19th century between the United States and Japan. It displays in embryo many of the characteristics that define Fenton's later work: technical mastery combined with a fascination with issues that arise from the Western interaction with other cultures. Our Western Furniture was followed by Exempla, notable for its frequent use of unfamiliar words, as well as commonplace words employed in an unfamiliar manner.

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James Lasdun
James Lasdun (born 1958 in London) is an English author, poet and academic. Lasdun was one of the judges for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Lasdun teaches or has taught poetry and fiction writing at New York University, Columbia University and The New School.
Lasdun has written two novels, The Horned Man (2002) and Seven Lies, which was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for fiction. He has written three collections of short stories, including The Siege: Collected Stories, the title story of which was adapted for film by Bernardo Bertolucci as Besieged; another story from this collection, Property was made into a short film by director Piper Laurie. His latest collection It's Beginning To Hurt was published in the UK in 2010 by Random House.
Lasdun has written four books of poetry, one of which, Landscape with Chainsaw, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for poetry.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

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Jan Morris
Jan Morris CBE (b. 2 October 1926, Clevedon, Somerset, England) is a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City.
Born in England of an English mother and Welsh father, Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but now considers herself Welsh. A gender re-assigned woman, she was published under her former name, James Morris, until the 1970s.
Morris served in World War II in the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers, and later wrote for The Times. As a correspondent for The Times, Morris scored a notable scoop in 1953 when accompanying the British expedition which was first to scale Mount Everest. Morris reported the success of Hillary and Tenzing in a coded message to the newspaper, "Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement", and by happy coincidence the news was released on the morning of Queen Elizabeth's coronation.

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Jane Gardam
Jane Mary Gardam OBE (born 11 July 1928, Coatham, North Yorkshire) is a British author of children's and adult fiction. She also reviews for the Spectator and the Telegraph, and writes for BBC radio, where her current project^[when?] is six programmes on the suburbs. She lives in Kent, Wimbledon, and Yorkshire. She has won numerous literary awards, including the Whitbread Award, twice.^{[citation needed]} She was married to David Gardam QC and had three children, Tim, Kitty and Tom. Tim Gardam is the Principal of St Anne's College, Oxford.
She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours.

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Jennifer Johnston
Jennifer Johnston (born 12 January 1930 in Dublin) is an Irish novelist, winner of the Whitbread Book Award for The Old Jest in 1979, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977. The Old Jest, a novel about the Irish War of Independence was later made into a film called The Dawning, starring Anthony Hopkins, produced by Sarah Lawson and directed by Robert Knights.
She was born in Dublin, Ireland, to the Irish actor/director Shelah Richards and the playwright Denis Johnston, a cousin of the late actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, via Fitzgerald's mother, Edith. She was educated at Trinity College Dublin, and currently lives in Derry, Northern Ireland. She was born into the Church of Ireland and many of her novels deal with the fading of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy in the 20th century.
She is a member of Aosdána.

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Jenny Diski
Jenny Diski FRSL (née Simmonds, born 8 July 1947) is an English writer. Diski was educated at University College London, and worked as a teacher during the 1970s and early 1980s. She won the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.
Jenny Diski is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books; the collections Don't and A View from the Bed include articles and essays written for the publication.
Jenny Diski has been described as "proto-post-postmodern", in being an author who "sees in the belief in epistemological systems and logic, whether postmodern or otherwise, the general psychosis of postmodern societies".
"In a market where, increasingly, authors are encouraged to be reader-friendly...Diski pursue themes that make for a difficult, troubling yet fascinating read: depression, madness, sado-masochism, and chaos". However, her later writings may at times take on a more positive tone: "The warmth of Apology for the Woman Writing is a stark contrast to much of Diski’s writing, which shows life as pointless, something at best to be endured, at worst something that should never have happened....Yet the narratives show forward movement, even if that movement is towards breakdown."

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Jenny Joseph
Jenny Joseph (born 7 May 1932) is an English poet.
<poem> When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth. </poem>

She was born in Birmingham, and with a scholarship, studied English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford (195). Her poems were first published when she was at university in the early 1950s. She became a journalist and worked for the Bedfordshire Times, the Oxford Mail and Drum Publications (Johannesburg, South Africa).
Joseph's best known poem, "Warning", was written in 1961 and is included in her 1974 collection Rose In the Afternoon and The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. "Warning" was identified as the UK's "most popular post-war poem" in a 1996 poll by the BBC. The second line was the inspiration for the Red Hat Society. Her first book of poems, The Unlooked-for Season won a Gregory Award in 1960 and she won a Cholmondeley Award for her second collection, Rose in the Afternoon in 1974.

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Jenny Uglow
Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther) is a British biographer, critic and publisher. The editorial director of Chatto & Windus, she has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled a women's biographical dictionary.
She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 1730–1810, and her works have twice been shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.
Uglow was brought up in Cumbria and later Dorset. She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College (1958–64) and St Anne's College, University of Oxford. After gaining a first in English, she took a B.Litt. In 1971, she married Steve Uglow, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent; the couple have three sons and a daughter. As of 2008, Uglow lives at Canterbury in Kent.
Uglow has worked in publishing since leaving university; as of 2008, she is the editorial director of the publishing company Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Random House.

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Jeremy Treglown
Jeremy Treglown (b. 24 May 1946) is a British author and literary critic who has written biographies of Roald Dahl, Henry Green and V.S. Pritchett and who co-edited the online biographical index of previously anonymous contributors to the Times Literary Supplement (1902-74). He is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Recently, he has been writing about Spanish history and culture in the twentieth century.
Treglown was educated at Bristol Grammar School and St Peter's College, Oxford. He was a lecturer in English Literature at Lincoln College Oxford and at UCL, and in 1979 joined the Times Literary Supplement as arts editor, becoming Editor from 1981 to 1990. In the 1970s he wrote regularly for the New Statesman on fiction and for The Times and Plays and Players on theatre and he now reviews for various papers including the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph. He has also published in The New Yorker and Granta.
His biography of Henry Green won the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award (2000) and his V.S Pritchett: A Working Life was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Award for biography and for the Duff Cooper Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Society's Council.

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Jim Crace
James "Jim" Crace (born 1 March 1946) is a contemporary English writer. The winner of numerous awards, Crace also has a large popular following. He currently lives in the Moseley area of Birmingham with his wife. They have two children, Thomas Charles Crace (born 1981) and the actress Lauren Rose Crace, who played Danielle Jones in EastEnders.
Crace was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and grew up with his siblings, Richard, Cyril, and Graham in Forty Hill, an area at the far northern point of Greater London, close to Enfield, where Crace attended Enfield Grammar School. He studied for a degree at the Birmingham College of Commerce (now part of Birmingham City University), where he was enrolled as an external student of the University of London. After securing a BA (Hons) in English Literature in 1968, he travelled overseas with the UK organization Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), working in Sudan. Two years later he returned to the UK, and worked with the BBC, writing educational programmes. From 1976 to 1987 he worked as a freelance journalist for The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers.

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Jo Shapcott
Jo Shapcott FRSL, (born 24 March 1953, London) is an English poet, editor and lecturer who has won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award.
Shapcott lived in Hemel Hempstead and attended Cavendish School in the town prior to studying as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, St Hilda's College, Oxford, and received a Harkness Fellowship to Harvard. She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She was a Visiting Professor at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, was a Visiting Professor at the London Institute and was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University from 2003-2005. She is President of the Poetry Society, a longstanding tutor for the Arvon Foundation.
Shapcott was appointed as CBE in 2002. She initially accepted the honour but decided to refuse during the period when the British government made preparations to invade Iraq. She wrote to the Cabinet Office saying " I can't possibly accept this." She commented, " I was being diagnosed and treated for cancer, so great public statements weren't on the cards really. I was just too ill."

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John Agard
John Agard (born 21 June 1949 in British Guyana) is an Afro-Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in the United Kingdom.
Agard grew up in Georgetown, British Guyana. He loved to listen to cricket commentary on the radio and began making up his own, which led to a love of language. He went on to study English, French and Latin at 'A' level, writing his first poetry when he was in the sixth-form. Leaving school in 1967, he taught the languages he had studied and worked in a local library. He was also a sub-editor and feature writer for the Guyana Sunday Chronicle, publishing two books whilst still in Guyana. His father settled in London and Agard moved to the UK with his partner Grace Nichols in 1977, settling in Ironbridge, Shropshire. He worked for the Commonwealth Institute and the BBC in London. His awards include the Paul Hamlyn Award for Poetry in 1997 and the Cholmondeley Award in 2004. Agard was Poet-in-Residence at the National Maritime Museum in 2008. His poem Half Caste has been featured in the AQA English GCSE anthology since 2002, meaning that many students (aged 14 – 16) have studied his work for their GCSE English qualification. Agard now lives in Rye, East Sussex.

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John Arden
John Arden (26 October 1930 – 28 March 2012) was an English playwright whose works tended to expose social issues of personal concern. At his death, he was laded as "one of the most significant British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 60s [...] one of the very few 20th-century dramatists you could mention in the same breath as Shakespeare, Molière and Brecht without the parallels sounding too far-fetched."
Born in Barnsley (which at the time was in the West Riding of Yorkshire), he was was educated at Sedbergh School in Cumbria, King's College, Cambridge and the Edinburgh College of Art, where he studied architecture. He first gained critical attention for the radio play The Life of Man in 1956 shortly after finishing his studies.
Arden was initially associated with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London. His 1959 play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, dealing with the realities of war and protesters against it, is considered his best. His work bore the heavy influence of Bertolt Brecht and the Epic Theatre. Other plays include Live Like Pigs, The Workhouse Donkey and Armstrong's Last Goodnight, the last of which was performed at the National Theatre, starring Albert Finney, after the Royal Court had rejected it. His 1978 radio play Pearl was considered in a Guardian survey to be one of the best plays for that medium.

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John Banville
William John Banville (born 8 December 1945), who writes as John Banville who sometimes writes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. He is recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".
Banville's career has seen him presented with numerous awards. His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011 and is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
William John Banville was born to Agnes (née Doran) and Martin Banville, a garage clerk, in Wexford, Ireland. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Anne Veronica "Vonnie" Banville-Evans has written both a children's novel and a reminiscence of growing up in Wexford.

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John Bayley (writer)
Professor John Bayley CBE, FBA, FRSL (born 1925, Lahore, British India) is a British literary critic and writer.
Bayley was educated at Eton, where he studied under G. W. Lyttelton, who also taught Aldous Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, George Orwell and Cyril Connolly. After leaving Eton, he went on to take a degree at Oxford. From 1974 to 1992, Bayley was Warton Professor of English at Oxford. He is also a novelist and writes literary criticism for several newspapers. He edited Henry James' The Wings of the Dove and a two-volume selection of James' short stories.
From 1956 until her death in 1999, he was married to the writer Dame Iris Murdoch. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, he wrote the book Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, which was made into the 2001 film Iris by Richard Eyre. In this film, Bayley was portrayed in his early years by Hugh Bonneville, and in his later years by Jim Broadbent, who won an Oscar for the performance. After Murdoch's death he married Audi Villers, a family friend. He was awarded the CBE in 1999.

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John Burnside
John Burnside (born 19 March 1955) is a Scottish writer, born in Dunfermline. He is one of only two poets (the other being Sean O'Brien) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book (Black Cat Bone).
Burnside studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since 1996. He is a former Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee and is now Professor in Creative Writing, Literature and Ecology at St Andrews University. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

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John Carey (critic)
John Carey (born 5 April 1934) is a British literary critic, and emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys’ Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. He served in the East Surrey Regiment, 1952-4, and was commissioned. After posts in a number of Oxford colleges, he became Merton Professor in 1975, retiring in 2001.
He is known, amongst other things, for his anti-elitist tone and iconoclastic views on high culture, as expressed for example in his recent book What Good Are the Arts? (2005).
He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2004, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. He is chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times and appears in radio and TV programmes such as Saturday Review and Newsnight Review.

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John Fuller (poet)
John Fuller (born 1 January 1937) is an English poet and author, and Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Fuller was born in Ashford, Kent, England, the son of poet and Oxford Professor Roy Fuller, and educated at St Paul's School and New College, Oxford. He began teaching in 1962 at the State University of New York, then continued at the University of Manchester. From 1966–2002 he was a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford; he is now Fellow Emeritus.
He has published 15 collections of poetry, including Stones and Fires (1996), Now and for a Time (2002) and the recent Song and Dance (2008). Chatto and Windus published a Collected Poems in 1996(1).His novel Flying to Nowhere (1983), a historical fantasy, won the Whitbread First Novel Award, and was nominated for the Booker Prize. In 1996 he won the Forward Prize for Stones and Fires and in 2006 the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. He has also written collections of short stories and several books for children. His poem Ship of Sounds, illustrated with a wood engraving by the artist Garrick Palmer, was published in 1981 in an edition of 130 by Gruffyground Press.

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John Gribbin
John R. Gribbin (born 1946) is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. The topical range of his prolific writings include quantum physics, biographies of famous scientists, human evolution, the origins of the universe, climate change and global warming. His writings often speculate on what some critics consider science fiction.
John Gribbin graduated with his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Sussex in 1966. Gribbin then earned his master of science (M.Sc.) degree in astronomy in 1967, also from the Univ. of Sussex, and he earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge (1971).
In 1968, Gribbin worked as one of Fred Hoyle's research students at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, and wrote a number of stories for New Scientist about the Institute's research and speculation into what were eventually discovered to be pulsars.
In 1974, Gribbin published, along with Stephen Plagemann, a book titled The Jupiter Effect, that predicted that the alignment of the planets in quadrant on one side of the Sun on March 10, 1982 would cause gravitational effects that would trigger earthquakes in the San Andreas fault, wiping out Los Angeles and its suburbs. Gribbin repudiated The Jupiter Effect in the July 17, 1980, issue of New Scientist magazine in which he stated that he had been "too clever by half".

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John Haffenden
Professor John Haffenden is an academic in the field of Literature at the University of Sheffield.
He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (B.A., M.A.), where he edited Icarus, and Oxford University (DPhil). He has spent periods as a Fellow of the Yaddo Foundation, New York; as a Visiting Scholar at St. John's College, Oxford; a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge; and a Visiting Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the English Association. A member of staff at the University of Sheffield since 1975, he was promoted to a Personal Chair in 1994. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.
One of his first books was a biographical study of the American poet John Berryman (1982), written with financial support from the Arts Council of Great Britain. His edition of Berryman's poetry, Henry's Fate and Other Poems 1967-1972 (1977), was chosen by the Association of American Publishers for exhibit at the Moscow International Book Fair in September 1979.

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John Julius Norwich
John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich CVO (born 15 September 1929) — known as John Julius Norwich — is an English historian, travel writer and television personality.
Norwich is the son of the Conservative politician and diplomat Duff Cooper and of Lady Diana Cooper, a celebrated beauty and society figure. Through his father, he is descended from King William IV and his mistress Dorothea Jordan.
He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, Canada (as a wartime evacuee), at Eton College, and at the University of Strasbourg. He served in the Royal Navy before taking a degree in French and Russian at New College, Oxford.
Joining the British Foreign Service after Oxford, John Julius Cooper served in Yugoslavia and Lebanon, and as a member of British delegation to the Disarmament Conference in Geneva. At his father's death in 1954, he inherited the title of Viscount Norwich, created for Duff Cooper in 1952, which made him a member of the British House of Lords.
In 1964, Norwich left the diplomatic service to become a writer. Apart from his many books (see list), he has also served as editor of series such as Great Architecture of the World, The Italian World, The New Shell Guides to Great Britain, The Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Art and the Duff Cooper Diaries. Norwich has often contributed to Cornucopia, a magazine devoted to the history and culture of Turkey.

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John Keegan
Sir John Keegan OBE FRSL (born 15 May 1934) is a British military historian, lecturer, writer and journalist. He has published many works on the nature of combat between the 14th and 21st centuries concerning land, air, maritime, and intelligence warfare, as well as the psychology of battle.
John Desmond Patrick Keegan was born in Clapham, London, to a family of Irish Catholic extraction. His father served in the First World War.
At the age of 13 Keegan contracted orthopaedic tuberculosis, which has subsequently affected his gait. The long-term effects of his tuberculosis rendered him unfit for military service, and the timing of his birth made him too young for service in World War II, as mentioned in his works as an ironic observation on his profession and interest. The illness also interrupted his education during his teenage years; however, his education included a period at King's College, Taunton, and two years at Wimbledon College, which led to entry to Balliol College, Oxford in 1953. Following graduation he worked at the American Embassy in London for three years.^{[citation needed]}

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John Lanchester
John Henry Lanchester (born 25 February 1962) is a British journalist and novelist. He was born in Hamburg, brought up in Hong Kong and educated in England, at Gresham's School, Holt between 1972 and 1980 and St John's College, Oxford.
Lanchester is the author of novels, a memoir, non-fiction and journalism.
Lanchester's journalism has appeared in Granta, The Observer, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, where he is a Contributing Editor. He also regularly writes on food and technology for Esquire.
The Debt to Pleasure (1996) won the 1996 Whitbread Book Award in the First Novel category and the 1997 Hawthornden Prize. It was described as a skilful and wickedly funny account of the life of a loquacious Englishman named Tarquin Winot, revealed through his thoughts on cuisine as he undertakes a mysterious journey around France. The revelations become more and more shocking as the truth about the narrator becomes apparent. He is a monster, and yet an appealing and erudite villain.

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Jon Stallworthy
Jon (Howie) Stallworthy (born 18 January 1935 in London) FBA FRSL is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow and (twice) Acting President of Wolfson College, a poet, and literary critic.
Stallworthy's parents, John Arthur and Margaret Stallworthy, were from New Zealand and moved to England in 1934. Stallworthy started writing poems when he was only seven years old. He was educated at the Dragon School, Rugby School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize. His works include seven volumes of poetry, and biographies of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice. He has edited several anthologies and is particularly known for his work on war poetry.
While researching the local history of New Zealand Stallworthy discovered an obscure volume entitled Early Northern Wairoa written by his great-grandfather, John Stallworthy (1854-1923), in 1916. From this book he learned that his great-great-grandfather, George Stallworthy (1809-1859), had left his birthplace of Preston Bissett in Buckinghamshire, England, for the Marquesas as a missionary. This discovery led in turn to him finding family-related letters in the archives of the London Missionary Society. Stallworthy's book A Familiar Tree (Oxford University Press, 1978) is a collection of poetry inspired by events depicted in these documents. Singing School is an autobiography which emphasises Stallworthy's development as a poet.

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Jonathan Bate
Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL (born 26 June 1958) is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is also Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, having succeeded Richard Smethurst who was Provost from 1991 to 2011.
He was educated at Sevenoaks School, the University of Cambridge and Harvard University, where he held a Harkness Fellowship. He was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and then King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University before becoming Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University of Warwick. He was created a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) on 17 June 2006. He is also a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of his undergraduate college, St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
He is married to the author and biographer Paula Byrne, with whom he has three children.
He is a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and from 2007-2011 sat on the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2010 he was commissioned by Faber and Faber to write a literary life of Ted Hughes. He sits on the European Advisory Board of the Princeton University Press.

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Jonathan Keates
Jonathan Basil Keates, (born 7 November 1946 in Paris, France) is an English writer, biographer and novelist. He was educated at Bryanston School and went on to read for his undergraduate degree at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Keates has written a number of acclaimed biographies and travel books, but his works of fiction have also received critical acclaim, most notably Allegro Postillions, for which he was awarded both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is very interested in Venice, and can not only speak English and Italian, but also French and Spanish. He also writes reviews in some prominent magazines.
His favourite poet is Alfred Lord Tennyson.
In addition, Keates is a successful English teacher employed by the City of London School and a judge of some writing competitions. According to his students, he is both "a genius" and "madly excellent".
Keates is identified as a Gay author. He is a Christian.

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Julia Blackburn
Julia Blackburn (born 1948) is a British author of both fiction and non-fiction. She is the daughter of poet Thomas Blackburn and artist Rosalie de Meric. A "shield" between her parents, her father once apologised for hitting Blackburn when he intended to strike her mother, she had a greater fear of de Meric.
Julia Blackburn's bohemian upbringing is the subject of her memoir The Three of Us (2008).

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Julian Mitchell
Charles Julian Humphrey Mitchell FRSL (born 1 May 1935), is an English playwright, screenwriter and occasional novelist. He is best known as the writer of the play and film Another Country, and as a screenwriter for TV, producing many original plays and series episodes, including at least ten for Inspector Morse.
Mitchell was born in in Epping, Essex, and educated at Winchester College, where he won the English Verse and Duncan Reading Prizes. He then did his national service in submarines 1953-55 as a Sub Lt RNVR. He then went to Oxford, where he received a BA with first class honours in 1958. This was followed by a period as a Harkness Fellow in the USA (1959–61). Since 1962 he has been a freelance writer.
In the late 1960s, Mitchell co-wrote the teleplay Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) with Ray Davies of The Kinks. It was never produced, though it gave rise to the band's concept album. He recently recalled the aborted project: "Arthur had a most unhappy history. It was originally meant to be a ... sort of rock opera, and we got as far as casting (excellent director and actors) and finding locations and were about to go when the producer went to a production meeting without a proper budget, tried to flannel his way through it, was immediately sussed and the production pulled. I have never been able to forgive the man."

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Juliet Barker
Juliet R. V. Barker FRSL (born 1958) is a British historian, specialising in the Middle Ages and literary biography. She is the author of a number of well-regarded works on the Brontës, William Wordsworth, and medieval tournaments. From 1983 to 1989 she was the curator and librarian of the Bronte Parsonage Museum.
Barker was educated at Bradford Girls' Grammar School and St Anne's College, Oxford, where she gained her doctorate in medieval history. .
A biography and summary of each book can be found on her official website, which was launched September 2009.
In 1999 she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Bradford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Justin Cartwright
Justin Cartwright (born 1945) is a British novelist.
He was born in South Africa, where his father was the editor of the Rand Daily Mail newspaper, and was educated there, in the United States and at Trinity College, Oxford. Cartwright has worked in advertising and has directed documentaries, films and television commercials. He managed election broadcasts, first for the Liberal Party and then the SDP-Liberal Alliance during the 1979, 1983 and 1987 British general elections. For his work on election broadcasts, Cartwright was appointed an MBE.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation presenter Ramona Koval described Cartwright's novels as being "... based in contemporary settings but he’s able to suffuse them with the big questions that haunt us". Three of Cartwright's early novels feature a character named Timothy Curtiz, named partly for Kurtz from Conrad's Heart of Darkness", and partly for Cartwright's own brother. In Interior, Curtiz is in Africa investigating the disappearance of his father in 1959 while on a trip for National Geographic. In Look At It This Way, Curtiz is a columnist for Manhattan magazine while he is living in London, has a daughter named Gemma, and by the end of the novel has a partner named Victoria. In Masai Dreaming, Curtiz is in Africa researching a film about Claudia Cohn-Casson, and his relationship with Victoria is having "complications." Look At It This Way was made into a three-part, 180-minutes drama by the BBC in 1992, starring Kristin Scott Thomas; Cartwright wrote the screenplay.

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Kamila Shamsie
Kamila Shamsie (born 1973) is a Pakistani American novelist who writes in the English language. She was brought up in Karachi and attended Karachi Grammar School.
She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College, and an MFA from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was influenced by the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali. Shamsie wrote her first novel, In The City By The Sea, while still at UMass, and it was published in 1998. It was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK, and Shamsie received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her second novel, Salt and Saffron, followed in 2000, after which she was selected as one of Orange's 21 Writers of the 21st century. Her third novel, Kartography, received widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys award in the UK. Both Kartography and her next novel, Broken Verses, have won the Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan. Her fifth novel Burnt Shadows was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her books have been translated in a number of languages.

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Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong FRSL (born 14 November 1944), is a British author and commentator who is the author of twelve books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic nun, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical faith. Armstrong first rose to prominence in 1993 with her book, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, an international best seller that is now required reading in many theology courses. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance, in many, of compassion or "The Golden Rule".
Armstrong received the $100,000 TED Prize in February 2008. She used that occasion to call for the creation of a Charter for Compassion, which was unveiled the following year.
Armstrong was born at Wildmoor, Worcestershire, into a family of Irish extraction who, after her birth, moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham. In 1962, while still in her teens, she became a nun in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching order, in which she remained for seven years. Once she had advanced from postulant and novice to professed nun, she enrolled in St Anne's College, Oxford, to study English. Armstrong left her order in 1969 while still a student at Oxford. After graduating with a Congratulatory First, she embarked on a DPhil on the poet Tennyson. According to Armstrong, she wrote her dissertation on a topic that had been approved by the university committee. Nevertheless it was failed by her external examiner on the grounds that the topic had been unsuitable. Armstrong did not formally protest this verdict, nor did she embark upon a new topic but instead abandoned hope of an academic career. She reports that this period in her life was marked by ill-health stemming from her life-long but, at that time, still undiagnosed temporal epilepsy.

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Karl Miller
Karl Fergus Connor Miller FRSL (born 2 August 1931) is a British literary editor, critic and writer.
He was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh and Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied English. He became literary editor of The Spectator and the New Statesman. Miller resigned from the latter over a disagreement with the magazine's then editor Paul Johnson, over the extent to which the literary pages treated difficult subjects and also Johnson's disapproval of The Beatles and their fans (Berry 214).
He was then editor of The Listener (1967–73) and subsequently the London Review of Books, which he founded, from 1979 to 1992. He was also Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature and head of the English Department at University College, London until 1992.

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Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson MBE (born 1951) is an English author.
She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature. She has often spoken publicly about the fact that she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, North Yorkshire, for a time, but now lives in Edinburgh.
Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller. Since then, she has published another five novels, one play, and one collection of short stories. Her work is often celebrated^{[by whom?]} for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Her most recent work has featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie. She has frequently criticised the media's coverage of her work - when she won Whitbread, for example, it was the fact that she was a "single mother" who lived outside London that garnered the most attention.^{[citation needed]}

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Kate Clanchy
Kate Clanchy (born 1965 Glasgow, Scotland) is a Scottish writer.
She was educated in Edinburgh and Oxford University. She lived in London's East End for several years, before moving to Oxfordshire where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer.
Her poetry and seven radio plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper; her work appeared in The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She also writes for radio and broadcasts on the World Service and BBC Radio 3 and 4. 2009. She is a Creative Writing Fellow of Oxford Brookes University and teaches Creative Writing at the Arvon Foundation. She is currently one of the writers-in-residence at the charity First Story. Her poetry has been included in A Book of Scottish Verse (2002) and The Edinburgh book of twentieth-century Scottish poetry (2006)
Lorna Gibb in The Independent commented:
Kate Clanchy's new book, What Is She Doing Here?, can be described as a memoir of her relationship with a Kosovan refugee, Antigona, but it is much more than that. Antigona escapes from her devastated village by way of Italy to London, where she meets, befriends and is employed by Clanchy. The bond between the two women is fraught but strong, caught in the contradiction of their roles as employer, employee and friend. But, as Clanchy finds the words to write Antigona's story, we begin to hear Antigona's own voice, one that both educates and angers the narrator, and, above all, makes her question many things about her life.

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Kate Summerscale
Kate Summerscale (born 1965) is an award-winning English writer and journalist.
She was brought up in Japan, England and Chile. After attending Bedales School (1978–1983), she took a double-first at Oxford University and an MA in Journalism from Stanford University. She lives in London with her son.
She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction 2008, and the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, about Joe Carstairs, 'fastest woman on water', which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography.
She formerly worked for The Independent and from 1995 to 1996 she wrote and edited obituaries for The Daily Telegraph. She is the former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph Her articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.
She has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize in 2001.

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Kathleen Jamie
Kathleen Jamie FRSL (born 13 May 1962) is a Scottish poet.
Born in Renfrewshire, Jamie is the oldest of three children. Her father was an accountant and her mother worked for a solicitor's office. Jamie grew up in Currie, near Edinburgh and went to Currie High School. She studied philosophy at Edinburgh University and while there her first poems were published in the pamphlet Black Spiders by the independent publisher Tom Fenton (brother of poet James Fenton). It won an Eric Gregory Award and a Scottish Arts Council book award. The Council also gave her a small grant with which she was able to pursue her writing after university and travel, including an extended trip to the Himalayas.
She has held several writer-in-residence posts, including one at the University of Dundee from 1991 to 1993. Jamie's poetry collection Jizzen (1999) is named for the word for childbed after bearing her own children. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize and she began teaching at University of St. Andrews. In 2001 she was given a Creative Scotland Award. In 2004 she won the Forward Poetry Prize for poetry for The Tree House and the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2005. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

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Kathryn Hughes
Kathryn Hughes is a British historian, biographer and journalist. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University and the University of East Anglia; her doctorate in Victorian History was developed into her first book, The Victorian Governess. Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia, she has been a Visiting Professor in the same field at Kingston University, and is currently there as a visiting writer.
Kathryn Hughes, a contributing editor to Prospect magazine, has reviewed and written for The Guardian, The Economist and The Times Literary Supplement. An occasional presenter of Open Book on BBC Radio 4, she also contributes to the same network's Saturday Review. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

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Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro OBE (Japanese: カズオ・イシグロ (Kazuo Ishiguro) or 石黒一雄 (Ishiguro Kazuo); born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese-born British novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.
Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, and winning the 1989 prize for his novel The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Recently, his novel Never Let Me Go has been adapted to film.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. In 1960 his family, including his two sisters, moved to Guildford, Surrey so that his father could begin research at the National Institute of Oceanography. He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school he took a 'gap year' and travelled through America and Canada, whilst writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies.

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Keith Alldritt
Keith Alldritt is a British novelist, biographer and critic. He was educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He lives in the West Midlands which are the setting for his novels. For some years he was a Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Illinois and then at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He has contributed articles on modern and contemporary art to various magazines and newspapers in Britain, Canada and the United States.
His novel The Good Pit Man was a New Fiction Society choice. For his biography David Jones-Writer and Artist he was elected to membership of the Welsh Academi. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Kit Wright
Kit Wright (born 1944) is the author of more than twenty-five books, for both adults and children, and the winner of awards including an Arts Council Writers' Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and (jointly) the Heinemann Award. After a scholarship to Oxford, he worked as a lecturer in Canada, then returned to England and a position in the Poetry Society. He is currently a full-time writer.
Educated at Oxford University, Wright moved to Canada to work as a lecturer. In 1970 he returned to London to work as an Education Officer for the Poetry Society until 1975. From 1977 to 1979 he was Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University. He subsequently returned to London and works full-time as a writer. He currently contributes monthly to The Oldie Magazine.

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Lacey Baldwin Smith
Lacey Baldwin Smith (b. 1922, Princeton, New Jersey, USA) is a historian and author specialising in the court of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Smith is the author of Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty and Catherine Howard: A Tudor Tragedy among other books.
Smith has taught at Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University. He has received two Fulbright awards, two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other awards. He lives in Vermont .
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972.

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Lady Antonia Fraser
Dame Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, DBE (born 27 August 1932), née Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction, best known as Lady Antonia Fraser. She is the widow of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, and, prior to her husband's death, was also known as Antonia Pinter.
Fraser is the daughter of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), and his wife, Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, née Elizabeth Harman (1906–2002). As the daughter of an Earl, she is accorded the honorific courtesy title "Lady" and thus customarily addressed formally as "Lady Antonia".
As a teenager, she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents. Her "maternal grandparents were Unitarians – a non-conformist faith with a strong emphasis on social reform ...". In response to criticism of her writing about Oliver Cromwell, she has said, "I have no Catholic blood". Before his own conversion in his thirties following a nervous breakdown in the Army, as she explains, "My father was Protestant Church of Ireland, and my mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20 when she abandoned it." She was educated at St Mary's School, Ascot and Dragon School, Oxford and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the last was also her mother's alma mater.

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Laurence Lerner
Laurence (David) Lerner (born 12 December 1925) is a South African born British literary critic and poet and novelist. He was born in Cape Town to parents of Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry, and educated at the University of Cape Town and Pembroke College, Cambridge.
He was lecturer in English, University College of the Gold Coast, 1949–53, tutor then lecturer in English, Queen's University, Belfast, 1953–62, lecturer then reader then professor of English, University of Sussex 1962-84, and professor of English, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1985-95. He won the 1991 Harvie Branscomb Distinguished Professor Award.
He was also a Governor of Leighton Park School, the Quaker school in England. He was at one point associated with the group of poets known as The Movement.
Here is a poem by Laurence Lerner (not infringing copyright, since submitted by the author, who holds the copyright!)
Kaspar Hauser
All that long time there was the place I was,
All that long same, the dark and constant same.
I came to being and it bit my eyes.

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Lavinia Greenlaw
Lavinia Greenlaw (born 1962) is an English poet and novelist.
Greenlaw was born in London into a family of doctors and scientists, but spent much of her childhood in a small village in Essex. She began her working life in publishing and arts administration before embarking upon a career as a freelance artist, critic and radio broadcaster. She lives in London and currently works as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She was a judge for the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize.
Her work is heavily informed by her interest in science and scientific enquiry, and by themes of displacement, loss and belonging. Critics have noted that her poetry is remarkable in its precision, and that her best poems contain a complexity and elusiveness that lead them to 'appreciate with each re-reading'.
Lavinia Greenlaw has been shortlisted for a number of literary awards, including the Whitbread Book Award (now known as the Costa Book Awards) and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She won the French Prix du Premier Roman for her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover and, most notably, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for 'A World Where News Travelled Slowly', the title poem from her second major collection.

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Lawrence Sail
Lawrence Sail (born 29 October 1942) is a contemporary British poet and writer.
Sail was born in London and brought up in Exeter. He studied French and German at Oxford University and subsequently taught for some years in Kenya, before returning to the UK, where he taught at Blundell's School and, later, Exeter School (where the modern languages department was headed by Harry Guest, another published poet). He is now a freelance writer.
Sail has published nine poetry collections, the most recent being Eye-Baby (2006); The World Returning (2002), Building into Air (1995), and Out of Land: New and Selected Poems (1992), and has edited a number of anthologies, including The New Exeter Book of Riddles (1999) with Kevin Crossley-Holland, and First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (1988). He also edited South-West Review from 1980 to 1985.
Sail works in schools and colleges, and has also written a radio play, as well as short features for radio. He has presented the BBC Radio 3 programme 'Poetry Now' and 'Time for Verse' on BBC Radio 4.

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Lee Langley
Lee Langley was born in Calcutta, India. She is the author of several novels, including Changes of Address (1987), a largely autobiographical account of her childhood in India, the first in a loose trilogy of novels set in India which was short-listed for the Hawthornden Prize . It was followed by Persistent Rumours (1992), which won the Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book), and A House in Pondicherry (1995). Her novel, Distant Music (2001), spans six centuries in a narrative that begins on the Portuguese island of Madeira in the 15th century and ends in London in the year 2000. Her most recent novel, A Conversation on the Quai Voltaire (2006), was set in 18th and 19th century Paris, Italy, Russia and Egypt, and recreated the life of Dominique Vivant Denon, one of the most significant figures in French art history.
She has also written several film scripts and screenplays, including television adaptations of Graham Greene's The Tenth Man; several stories by Rumer Godden, and Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance. She has written on travel and the arts for leading newspapers and magazines.

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Lesley Glaister
Lesley Glaister (born 1956, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, UK) is a British novelist and playwright. She has written 12 novels, Chosen being the most recent, one play and numerous short stories and radio plays. She is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of St Andrews, and is a regular contributor of book reviews to the Spectator and The Times. She is married to author Andrew Greig.
Her books have been described as 'suburban gothic' and compared^{[by whom?]} with Ruth Rendell, Kate Atkinson and Ian McEwan. Her subject matter is often serious (murder, madness and obsession crop up regularly in her books) but with a thread of dark humour running through it. Her first novel Honour Thy Father (1990) won the Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award, Now You See Me was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction in 2002, and Easy Peasy was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award 1998. Her first play, Bird Calls was performed at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, in 2003.
Gleister is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently the Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh.

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Leslie Norris
George Leslie Norris FRSL (21 May 1921 – 6 April 2006), was a prize-winning Welsh poet and short story writer. Up to 1974 he earned his living as a college lecturer, teacher and headmaster. From 1974 he combined full-time writing with residencies at academic institutions in Britain and the United States.
Today he is considered one of the most important Welsh writers of the post-war period. His collections of stories, including Collected Stories, and poems, including Collected Poems, have won many prizes, among them the Cholmondeley Poetry Prize, the David Higham Memorial Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award, the AML Award for poetry (in 1996) and the Welsh Arts Council Senior Fiction Award.
George Leslie Norris was born in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. His father George was a tall athletic man lacking education, because he had to fight in the First World War. After the war his father was employed as an engineer in a coal mine. Leslie had two younger brothers, Eric and Gordon.
Leslie had a cheerful childhood. When he was nineteen years old he joined the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Leslie initially trained as a pilot, but was injured when he collided with another plane on the ground while practicing landings. After his recovery, he spent the remainder of his time in the Air Force playing football on the Air Force team.

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Lewis Wolpert
Lewis Wolpert CBE FRS FRSL (born 19 October 1929) is a developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster.
Wolpert was educated at the University of Witwatersrand (BSc), at Imperial College London, and at King's College London (PhD). As of 2010 he holds the position of Emeritus Professor of Biology as applied to Medicine in the Department of Anatomy and developmental biology at University College London.
Biologists recognise Wolpert for elaborating and championing the ideas of positional information and positional value: molecular signals and internal cellular responses to them that enable cells to do the right thing in the right place during embryonic development. The essence of these concepts is that there is a dedicated set of molecules for spatial coordination of cells that is the same across many species and across different developmental stages and tissues. The discovery of Hox gene codes in flies and vertebrates has largely vindicated Wolpert's positional-value concept, while identification of growth-factor morphogens in many species has supported the concept of positional information.

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Linda Colley
Linda Colley, CBE, FBA, FRSL, FRHistS (born 13 September 1949) is a historian of Britain, empire and nationalism. She is currently Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University in the United States.
Born in Chester, England, Colley was an undergraduate at Bristol University, and completed her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where she was supervised by John H. Plumb. After holding Fellowships at Girton College and Newnham College, in 1978 she became the first woman Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
In 1982 Colley accepted a post at Yale University, where she was appointed Richard M. Colgate Professor of History in 1992 and where she was also Academic Director of the Lewis Walpole Library. Her third book, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), won the Wolfson History Prize, and has attracted wide and continuing attention both as a study of the evolution and complexities of British national identities, and as a contribution to understandings of nationalism more broadly. In 1998, Colley was offered a Sterling Professorship, Yale's highest Professorial rank, but declined it in favor of an offer of a Research Chair in England.

wn.com/Linda_Colley

Linda Kelly
Linda L. Kelly is an American attorney. She is currently serving as the Attorney General of Pennsylvania.
Kelly is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and the Duquesne University School of Law.
Kelly was an assistant district attorney in Allegheny County; she also served twice as an acting U.S. Attorney, in 1997-98 and again in 2001. She was nominated by Governor Tom Corbett to be his permanent successor as Attorney General of Pennsylvania in February 2011, and was unanimously confirmed by the Pennsylvania Senate on May 23, 2011. Kelly is the first woman to serve as state attorney general since Anne Alpern left office in 1961.
Kelly and her husband Paul have one daughter, Kate.

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Liz Jensen
Liz Jensen (born 1959) is an English novelist.
Liz Jensen was born in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a Danish father and an Anglo-Moroccan mother. She first worked as a journalist in the Far East, and then for the BBC as a TV and Radio producer. She then worked as a sculptor in France, where she wrote her first novel, Egg Dancing (1995), returning to London to write Ark Baby (1998), The Paper Eater (2000), and War Crimes for the Home (2002)
Her next novel, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, was being produced as a movie by Anthony Minghella shortly before his death.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2005.

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Lyndall Gordon
Lyndall Gordon is a British-based writer and academic, known for her literary biographies. She is a Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Born in Cape Town, she was an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, then a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York City. She married the pathologist Siamon Gordon; they have two daughters.
Gordon is the author of Eliot's Early Years (1977), which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize ; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (1994), winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; and Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, shortlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent publication is Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds (2010), which has overturned the established assumptions about the poet's life.

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Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss (born 1955, Kingston upon Thames) is an English writer and journalist, best known for her popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
Lynne Truss grew up in Petersham and was educated at Tiffin Girls’ Grammar School in Kingston. She gained a first-class honours degree at University College London in English Language and Literature.
After university in 1977, she joined the Radio Times as a sub-editor before moving in 1978 to the Times Higher Education Supplement as the deputy literary editor. She began freelance writing at the same time. Truss was Literary Editor of The Listener (1986–90) and was an arts and books reviewer for The Independent on Sunday before joining The Times in 1991, where first she spent six years writing television criticism, illustrated by John Minnion, followed by four years as a sports columnist. She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Woman's Journal. She now reviews books for The Sunday Times. Her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves (November 2003), about the misuse of punctuation, became a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. In 2005, she released a book on rudeness titled Talk to the Hand: the utter bloody rudeness of the world today (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door).

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Malorie Blackman
Malorie Blackman was born in 1962. She qualified in Computer Science and followed a successful career in computing, before becoming a writer at the age of 28. Her first published book was Not So Stupid! (1990), a book of short stories. Since then she has written many books and scripts, and her popularity has steadily grown. Her scripts for television include several episodes of Byker Grove, Whizziwig and Pig-Heart Boy, and she has also written original dramas for CITV and BBC Education. Her stage play, The Amazing Birthday, was performed in 2002.
She writes for all ages of children. Her picture books include I Want a Cuddle! (2001) and Jessica Strange (2002) and she has written many reader books for early and more confident readers. Her novels include: Hacker (1992); the story of Vicky, who saves her father from being wrongly convicted of stealing from the bank after hacking into the bank’s computer to solve the crime herself; Thief! (1995), about a child who is transported into the future after being accused of a crime she did not commit; and Pig-Heart Boy (1997), the diary of 13-year-old Cameron, who needs a heart transplant. The latter book and its subsequent adaptation as a series for television won several awards, including a BAFTA for best children’s drama in 2000.

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Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice. Atwood has increasingly been mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.

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Margaret Forster
Margaret Forster (born 25 May 1938) is a British author. She was born in Carlisle, England, where she attended Carlisle and County High School for Girls (1949–1956), and then won an Open Scholarship to read modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, from where she graduated in 1960.
After a short period as a teacher at Barnsbury Girls' School in Islington, north London (1961–1963), she has worked as a novelist, biographer and freelance literary critic, contributing regularly to book programmes on television, to BBC Radio 4 and various newspapers and magazines. She was a member of the BBC Advisory Committee on the Social Effects of Television (1975–1977), the Arts Council Literary Panel (1978–1981), and chief reviewer for non-fiction in the Evening Standard (1977–1980). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975.
Forster is married to the writer, journalist and broadcaster Hunter Davies. They live in London and in the Lake District.
She is the author of many successful novels, including Georgy Girl (1965) (filmed in 1966 and adapted for a short-lived 1970 Broadway musical), Lady's Maid (1990), Diary of an Ordinary Woman (2003), Have the Men Had Enough? (1989) and The Memory Box (1999), two memoirs, Hidden Lives (1995) and Precious Lives (1998), and several acclaimed biographies, most recently Good Wives (2001) and a fictionalised biography of the artist Gwen John, Keeping the world away (2006). She wrote Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin (1997), an account of the Carr's biscuit factory in Carlisle.

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Margaret MacMillan
Margaret Olwen MacMillan, OC (born 1943 in Toronto, Ontario) is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, where she is Warden of St Antony's College. She is former provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto and previously, at Ryerson University. A leading expert on history and international relations, MacMillan is a frequent commentator in the media.
Margaret MacMillan was born to Dr. Robert MacMillan and Eluned Carey Evans. Her maternal grandfather was Dr. Thomas John Carey Evans of the Indian Medical Service. The senior Evans served as personal physician to Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading during the latter's term as Viceroy of India (1921–1926). Her maternal grandmother, Olwen Elizabeth Lloyd George, was a daughter of David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and his first wife Margaret Owen.
MacMillan received an Honours B.A. in history from the University of Toronto (attending Trinity College, where she would later become Provost) and a B.Phil. in Politics and D.Phil. (1974) at Oxford University (attending St Hilda's College and later St Antony's College, where she became Warden in 2007). Her doctoral dissertation, also completed at Oxford, was on the social and political perspectives of the British in India. From 1975 to 2002 she was a professor of history at Ryerson University in Toronto, including five years as department chair. She is the author of Women of the Raj, a selection of the "History Book Club." In addition to numerous articles and reviews on a variety of Canadian and world affairs, MacMillan has co-edited books dealing with Canada's international relations, including with NATO, and with Canadian-Australian relations.

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Marilyn Butler
Marilyn Butler (born 1937) is a British literary critic. She was Rector of Exeter College, Oxford from 1993 to 2004, and was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, from 1986 to 1993. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.
She was educated at Wimbledon High School and St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Her published works include Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries and Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Much of her work has been devoted to the career of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth, including a classic literary biography of Maria Edgeworth and an important collected edition of Edgeworth's works for Pickering & Chatto.
She is married to David Butler; the couple have three sons. In June 2003 she was awarded an honorary degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University.^{[citation needed]}

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Marina Warner
Marina Sarah Warner, CBE, FBA (born 9 November 1946 in London, England) is a British novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She is currently Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex.
She was born in London to an English father and Italian mother. Her paternal grandfather was the English cricketer Sir Pelham Warner. She was brought up in Cairo, Brussels and in Berkshire, England, where she studied at St Mary's School, Ascot. She studied French and Italian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. In 1971, she married William Shawcross, with whom she had a son Conrad Shawcross; the couple later divorced.
Her first book was The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz'u-hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835-1908 (1972), followed by the controversial Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) a provocative study of Roman Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary. These were followed by Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form and Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism.

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Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of several of Britain's best-known novels, including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He was the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

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Martin Bax
Martin Bax is a British consultant paediatrician, who, in addition to his medical career, founded the Arts magazine Ambit in 1959. He lives in London and continues to practice, and edit Ambit, along with Kate Pemberton and Geoff Nicholson. Since he created it, Ambit has published poetry, prose and artwork from the likes of Fleur Adcock, Peter Porter^{[disambiguation needed ]}, Tennessee Williams, J. G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and many others.
His first published novel was The Hospital Ship published by Cape and New Directions in 1976. More recently Love on the Borders was published by Seren in 2005. In the 1970s using text from The Hospital Ship he developed the Vietnam Symphony with jazz trumpeter Henry Lowther and this was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and subsequently on BBC Radio 3. He has also written for children and his book Edmund went Far Away was published in the US and the UK.
Martin Bax organises regular readings in the UK for Ambit magazine, and jazz events as well, presented at various venues in London and elsewhere, most recently at The Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell, London and Chelsea Arts Club.

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Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley, née Scrutton (born September 13, 1919), is an English moral philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and is known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978), when she was in her fifties. It was followed by several others, including Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (1981), Animals And Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984) and The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (1994). She was awarded an honorary D. Litt by Durham University in 1995. Her autobiography,The Owl Of Minerva, was published in 2005.
She has written extensively about what philosophers can learn from nature, particularly from animals. A number of her books and articles have discussed philosophical ideas appearing in popular science, including those of Richard Dawkins. She has also written in favour of a moral interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis.
The Guardian has described her as a fiercely combative philosopher and the UK's "foremost scourge of 'scientific pretension'".

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Matt Ridley
Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, FRSL, FMedSci, DL (born 7 February 1958, in Northumberland), known as Matt Ridley, is a British scientist, journalist and author. He also is a former Chairman of Northern Rock. He has written several science books including the The Red Queen (1994), Genome (1999) and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010). Ridley has been short-listed twice for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. In 2011, he won the Hayek Prize, which "honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty." Ridley also gave the Angus Millar Lecture on "scientific heresy" at the RSA in 2011 and his TED.com talk on "when ideas have sex" has been viewed 1.4 million times. He was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and won the Julian Simon award in March 2012.
Ridley was educated at Eton College from 1970–1975 and then went on to Magdalen College of the University of Oxford and completed a BA degree with first class honours in zoology and then a DPhil degree in zoology in 1983.

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Matthew Kneale
Matthew Kneale (born 24 November 1960) is a British writer, best known for his 2000 novel English Passengers, which won the prestigious Whitbread Book Award and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He went to school at Latymer Upper School and then studied Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, and afterwards spent a year in Japan, when he began writing. He now lives in Italy.
Kneale is the son of the writers Nigel Kneale and Judith Kerr. His other novels include Whore Banquets (1987 – winner of the 1988 Somerset Maugham Award, which was also won by his father in 1950; republished in 2002 as Mr. Foreigner), Inside Rose's Kingdom (1989), Sweet Thames (1992 – winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), and When We Were Romans (2008). In 2004, he released the short story collection Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance.
English Passengers was also shortlisted for Australia's Miles Franklin Award in 2000, making Kneale the first non-Australian author to be shortlisted for the award.

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Maureen Duffy
Maureen Patricia Duffy (born 21 Oct 1933 in Worthing, Sussex) is a contemporary British poet, playwright and novelist. She has also published a literary biography of Aphra Behn, and The Erotic World of Faery a book-length study of eroticism in faery fantasy literature.
After a tough childhood, Duffy took her degree in English from King's College London. She also attended the secondary school Sarah Bonnell She went on to be a schoolteacher from 1956 to 1961, and edited three editions of a poetry magazine called the sixties. She then turned to writing full-time as a poet and playwright after being commissioned to produce a screenplay by Granada Television. Her first novel, written at the suggestion of a publisher, That's How It Was (1962), was published to great acclaim. Her first openly lesbian novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in the famous lesbian Gateways club in London.
To date she has published around thirty works, including five volumes of poetry. Her Collected Poems, 1949–84 appeared in 1985. Her work has often used Freudian ideas and Greek Myth as a framework.

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Mavis Gallant
Mavis Leslie Gallant, CC, née Mavis Leslie Young (born 11 August 1922) is a Canadian writer.
An only child, Gallant was born in Montreal, Quebec. Her father died when she was young, and her mother remarried. Gallant received her education at seventeen different public, convent, and French-language boarding schools. In her twenties, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard (1944–1950). She married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician in 1942. The couple divorced five years later in 1947. Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing.
Gallant has been candid about her need for autonomy and privacy. In an interview with Geoff Hancock in Canadian Fiction magazine in 1978, she discussed her “life project” and her deliberate move to France to write by saying, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It's what I like doing.” In the preface to her collection of stories, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), she uses the words of Boris Pasternak as her epigraph: “Only personal independence matters.”

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Max Egremont
John Max Henry Scawen Wyndham, 7th Baron Leconfield, 2nd Baron Egremont (born 1948), generally known simply as Max Egremont, is a British biographer and novelist.
Egremont is the eldest son of John Edward Reginald Wyndham, 6th Baron Leconfield and 1st Baron Egremont, and Pamela Wyndham-Quin, and succeeded his father in 1972. He is a direct descendant of Sir John Wyndham. He lives at the family seat of Petworth House in Sussex. Egremont studied modern history at Oxford University and has written books about Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Arthur Balfour and Sir Edward Spears. He is also the official biographer of Siegfried Sassoon, appointed by Sassoon's son George. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2001.

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Max Hastings
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL (born 28 December 1945) is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. He is the son of Macdonald Hastings, the noted British journalist and war correspondent, and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar.
Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year. In 1967-68 he spent a year in the United States as a Fellow of the World Press Institute, following which he published his first book, an account of the US in its tumultuous election year America 1968: The Fire This Time. He became a foreign correspondent and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV's 24 hours current affairs programme and for the Evening Standard in London. Hastings was the first journalist to enter the liberated Port Stanley during the 1982 Falklands War. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he returned to the Evening Standard as editor in 1996 until his retirement in 2002. He received a knighthood in 2002. He was inducted into the elite political dining society known as The Other Club in 1993.

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Melvyn Bragg
Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg, FRS, FBA, FRSA, FRSL, FRTS (born 6 October 1939) is an English broadcaster and author best known for his work with the BBC and for presenting the The South Bank Show (1978–2010). Since 1998 he has presented over 500 weekly episodes of the BBC Radio discussion programme In Our Time.
Bragg was born 6 October 1939 in Carlisle, Cumberland (now Cumbria), the son of Mary Ethel (née Park), a tailor, and Stanley Bragg, a stock keeper turned mechanic. He attended the Nelson Thomlinson School in Wigton, and then read Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Bragg began his career in 1961 as a general trainee at the BBC, spending his first two years in radio at the BBC World Service, then at the BBC Third Programme and BBC Home Service. He then joined the production team of Huw Wheldon's Monitor arts series on BBC Television. He presented the BBC arts show The Lively Arts, a series that included the first ever televised documentary on Doctor Who broadcast in 1977, Whose Doctor Who. His work as a writer and broadcaster began in 1967. He is best known for the London Weekend Television (LWT) arts programme The South Bank Show, which he edited and presented from 1978 to 2010. He was Head of Arts at LWT from 1982 to 1990 and Controller of Arts at LWT from 1990. He is also known for his many programmes on BBC Radio 4, including Start the Week (1988 to 1998), The Routes of English, (mapping the history of the English language), and In Our Time (1998 to present), which in March 2011 broadcast its 500th programme. In February 2012, he began Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture, a three-part series on BBC2 examining popular media culture with an analyses of the British social class system.

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Michael Baldwin
Michael Baldwin is a fictional character on the CBS television soap opera The Young and the Restless, portrayed by Christian LeBlanc. He first appeared in December 1991 until June 1993, and his exit storyline included a sentence of 4 years to jail. His character returned four years later on April 25, 1997.
The character has also crossed over briefly to As the World Turns on April 4 and 5, 2005. LeBlanc won Daytime Emmy Awards for the role in 2005, 2007, and 2009.
Michael is a prominent lawyer in Genoa City and a partner at Baldwin, Blair and Associates. He is the son of Lowell Baldwin (Michael Gross) and Gloria Bardwell (Judith Chapman) and the half brother of Kevin Fisher (Greg Rikaart) and Eden Baldwin (Jessica Heap). He's currently married to Lauren Fenmore (Tracey E. Bregman), with whom he has a son, Fenmore Baldwin.
In 1991, Michael was a mentor to budding lawyer Christine Blair (Lauralee Bell). The two were working well together until, after winning a court case, Michael kissed Christine and became obsessed and began sexually harassing her. Soon after, Michael attempted to rape Christine. When Paul Williams (Doug Davidson) tried to save her, Michael shot him. Michael was then jailed for four years.

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Michael Frayn
Michael J. Frayn (born 8 September 1933) is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. His works often raise philosophical questions in a humorous context. Frayn's wife is Claire Tomalin, the biographer and literary journalist.
Frayn was born to a deaf asbestos salesman in Mill Hill, a suburb of London, grew up in Ewell, Surrey, and was educated at Kingston Grammar School. Following two years of National Service, during which he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, Frayn read Moral Sciences (Philosophy) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957. He then worked as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, where he established a reputation as a satirist and comic writer, and began publishing his plays and novels.

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Michael Holroyd
Sir Michael De Courcy Fraser Holroyd, FRHistS, FRSL (born 27 August 1935) is an English biographer.
Holroyd was born in London and educated at Eton College, though he has often claimed Maidenhead Public Library as his alma mater.
In 1964 he published his first book, a biography of writer Hugh Kingsmill, but his reputation was consolidated in 1967-68 with the publication of his life of Lytton Strachey (which playwright Christopher Hampton later used extensively when writing the screenplay for the 1995 film Carrington). Holroyd has also written biographies of Augustus John and, in four volumes, of George Bernard Shaw.
Holroyd acted as Chairman of the Society of Authors, 1973–83, and from 1985 to 1988 was president of the English branch of PEN. His awards include the 2001 Heywood Hill Literary Prize and the 2005 David Cohen Prize for literature. He was also President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2003 to 2008 and was knighted in the 2007 New Years' Honours List. His latest book, A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers (2010), focuses on the Villa Cimbrone on the Gulf of Salerno and the Edwardian literary and society figures who lived there.

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Michael Longley

Michael Longley, CBE (born 27 July 1939) is a Northern Irish poet from Belfast.
Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus. He was Professor of Poetry for Ireland from 2007 to 2010, a cross-border academic post set up in 1998, previously held by John Montague, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Durcan. He was succeeded in 2010 by Harry Clifton.
In North America, Michael Longley is published by Wake Forest University Press. His wife Edna Longley is also an influential critic on modern Irish and British poetry.
Gorse Fires (1991) won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The Weather in Japan (2000) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Queen's University Belfast (1995) and Trinity College, Dublin (1999) and was the 2001 recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Longley was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours. He won a 2011 London Awards for Art and Performance.

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Michael Morpurgo
Michael Morpurgo, OBE,FKC, AKC (born 5 October 1943) is an English author, poet, playwright and librettist, best known for his work in children's literature. He was the third Children's Laureate.
Michael Morpurgo was educated at schools in central London, Devon, Sussex and Kent; his unhappy experiences at boarding school would inform his novel The Butterfly Lion, one of his more famous works. He attended the independent prep school Mount House in Devon until he was 13. He then went to The King's School, an independent school in Canterbury, and while there he was once described as being "rather stupid but great at rugby". He later trained for the British Army at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He then took up a teaching job.^{[citation needed]} He graduated with a 3rd class degree in English and French from King's College London
Morpurgo's first job was as a primary school teacher, in Kent. In his late twenties, while he was teaching, he discovered his talent for storytelling, of which he later said "I could see there was magic in it for them, and realized there was magic in it for me."

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Michèle Roberts
Michèle Brigitte Roberts (born 20 May 1949, Bushey, Hertfordshire) is a British writer, novelist and poet. Roberts was the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother (Monique Caulle) and English Protestant father (Reginald Roberts); she has dual UK-France nationality.
She was raised in Edgware, Middlesex and educated at a convent, expecting to become a nun, before reading English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she lost her Catholic faith, and also studied at University College London training to be a librarian. She worked for the British Council in Bangkok, Thailand in this role from 1973 to 1974.
Active in socialist and feminist politics (the Women's Liberation Movement) since the early 1970s, she formed a writers' collective with Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Zoe Fairbairns. At this time she was the Poetry Editor (1975-7) at Spare Rib, the feminist magazine, and later at City Limits (1981–83). Her first novel A Piece of the Night was published in 1978 and Daughters of the House (1992) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh, OBE (born 20 February 1943) is a British writer and director of film and theatre. He studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and studied further at the Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design. He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s his career moved between work for the theatre and making films for BBC Television, many of which were characterized by a gritty "kitchen sink realism" style. His well-known films include Life is Sweet (1990), the comedy-drama Career Girls (1997), the Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy Turvy (1999), and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). His most notable works are arguably Naked (1993) for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes, the BAFTA-winning (and Oscar-nominated) Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies (1996) and Golden Lion winner Vera Drake (2004).

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Mimi Khalvati
Mimi Khalvati is an Iranian-born British poet.
She was born in Tehran, Iran in 1944. She grew up on the Isle of Wight and was educated in Switzerland at the University of Neuchâtel, and in London at the Drama Centre and the School of Oriental and African Studies. She then worked as a theatre director in Tehran, translating from English into Persian and devising new plays, as well as co-founding the Theatre in Exile group. She now lives in Hackney and is a Visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths College and a director of the London Poetry School.
Khalvati was 47 when her first book appeared. Its title, In White Ink, derives from the work of Helene Cixous who claimed that women in the past have written "in white ink". Michael Schmidt observes that Khalvati is "formally a most resourceful poet".
Khalvati is the founder of The Poetry School, running poetry workshops and courses in London, and is co-editor of the school's first two anthologies of new writing: Tying the Song and Entering The Tapestry. She is also tutor at the Arvon Foundation, and has taught creative writing at universities and colleges in the US and England.

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Miranda Carter
Miranda Carter is a British writer and biographer. She was educated at St Paul's Girls School and Exeter College, Oxford.
Her first book was a biography of the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt, entitled Anthony Blunt: His Lives. It won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Orwell Prize and was short-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction, the Guardian First Book award, the Whitbread Biography prize and the James Tait Black Memorial prize. In the US it was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the seven best books of 2002.
She is married to John Lanchester, with whom she has two children, and lives in London.

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Miranda Seymour
Miranda Jane Seymour (born August 8, 1948) is an English literary critic, novelist, and biographer.
Miranda Seymour was two years old when her parents moved into Thrumpton Hall, the family's ancestral home in Nottinghamshire. This celebrated Jacobean mansion is on the south bank of the River Trent at the secluded village of Thrumpton. Miranda was raised by a father, George Fitzroy Seymour, who loved racing motorbikes and classic cars. An author of children's books, novels, and several biographies, Miranda Seymour has also contributed to a number of leading newspapers and literary journals, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in recent years, a visiting Professor of English Studies at the Nottingham Trent University, Seymour is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
In 1972 she married the novelist and historian Andrew Sinclair and had a son, Merlin; her second marriage, to Anthony Gottlieb, then executive editor of The Economist and author of a history of Western philosophy, ended in 2003. A transatlantic literary room-swap has led to her third marriage, in 2006, to Ted Lynch, a Bostonian. Miranda Seymour divides her time between London and Thrumpton Hall, now dually used by the family and for weddings and corporate events.

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Molly Lefebure
Molly Lefebure is a British writer who has an interest in the English Lake District and the Lake Poets.
Molly Lefebure was born in London, the daughter of Charles Hector Lefebure and Elizabeth Cox, and was educated at the North London Collegiate School. She went on to study at King's College London at the University of London where she met her husband, John Gerrish. During World War II she worked as a newspaper reporter for a London newspaper. During the war she met Dr Keith Simpson (the pathologist) and worked for him as his secretary. She gained information for her first book Evidence for the Crown, and went to live with her husband and her two children at Kingston-upon-Thames by the river.
Her children's books include illustrations by the famous Lakeland author, hill walker and illustrator Alfred Wainwright.
She is a Coleridge scholar. After studying drug addiction at Guy's Hospital in London for six years, she wrote a biography of Coleridge that researched the effect on his life of his addiction to opiates.

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Moris Farhi
(Musa) Moris Farhi MBE (born 1935, Ankara, Turkey) is an author who has been vice-president of International PEN since 2001.
Farhi was born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1935. Farhi received B.A. in Humanities from Robert Academy, Istanbul, in 1954. He came to the UK the same year and trained at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1956 and settling in London. After a brief career as an actor, he took up writing.
Farhi has written several novels, including Children of the Rainbow and Journey through the Wilderness. Children of the Rainbow has received two prizes: the “Amico Rom” from the Associazione Them Romano of Italy (2002); and the “Special” prize from the Roma Academy of Culture and Sciences in Germany (2003). The French edition of Young Turk (Jeunes Turcs) received the 2007 Alberto Benveniste Prize for Literature. His poems have appeared in many British, US and European publications and in the anthology of 20th century Jewish poets, Voices Within the Ark (Avon, US, 1979). He has also published short stories in anthologies and magazines in the UK, the US and Poland. He has written many television scripts; a film, The Primitives; and a stage play, From The Ashes of Thebes.

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Morton N. Cohen
Morton Norton Cohen (born 27 February 1921) is an American author and scholar, and Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York, best known for his extensive studies of children's author Lewis Carroll, including his 1995 biography Lewis Carroll: A Biography.
Cohen was born in Calgary, Canada, and grew on the North Shore of Boston. He has taught English at West Virginia University, Syracuse University, Rutgers University and the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Among his dedicated work on Charles Dodgson, he has also produced studies on Henry Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and other Victorian subjects, as well as children's literature, travel articles and fiction. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Literature in 1996. The Modern Language Association set up the biennially Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters in his name in 1989. The first award was given in 1991. Under the terms of the award, the "winning collection will be one that provides readers with a clear, accurate, and readable text; necessary background information; and succinct and eloquent introductory material and annotations. The edited collection should be in itself a work of literature."

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Nicholas Rankin
Nicholas Rankin (born 1950) is a British writer and broadcaster.
Rankin was born in Yorkshire, England but grew up in Kenya. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford. He has lived and worked in Bolivia and Catalonia, Spain.
He worked for the BBC World Service for 20 years. He was Chief Producer, Arts, at the BBC World Service, when his eight-part series on ecology and evolution, A Green History of the Planet, won two UN awards.
He currently works as a freelance writer and broadcaster and lives in London with his wife, the novelist Maggie Gee, and their daughter Rosa.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

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Nicholas Shakespeare
Nicholas William Richmond Shakespeare (born 3 March 1957 in Worcester) is a British novelist and biographer.
Born to a diplomat, Shakespeare grew up in the Far East and in South America. He was educated at the Dragon School preparatory school then Winchester College and Cambridge and worked as a journalist for BBC television and then on The Times as assistant arts and literary editor. From 1988 to 1991 he was literary editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.
His time in South America is represented in two novels, The Vision of Elena Silves (1989, Somerset Maugham Award, Betty Trask Award) and The Dancer Upstairs (1995, American Library Association Award). Other less well known works from this period are The Men Who Would Be King (1984), Londoners (1986) and The High Flyer (1993). In 1999, Shakespeare published his biography of Bruce Chatwin to widespread critical acclaim. This was followed by the novel Snowleg (2004, long-listed for the Booker Prize, Dublin IMPAC Award) a 'place' book, In Tasmania (2004, winner of the Tasmania Book Prize 2006), Secrets of the Sea (2007) and Inheritance (2010).

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Nikolai Tolstoy
Count Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (Russian: Николай Дмитриевич Толстой-Милославский; born 23 June 1935) is an Anglo-Russian historian and author who writes under the name Nikolai Tolstoy. A member of the prominent Tolstoy family, he is of part Russian descent and is the stepson of the author Patrick O'Brian. He is also a former parliamentary candidate of the United Kingdom Independence Party.
Tolstoy is the head of the senior branch of the Tolstoy family, being descended from Ivan Andreyevich Tolstoy (1644–1713). His relationship to the famous author Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) is that of a distant cousin, as Leo Tolstoy was descended from Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy (1645–1729), the younger brother of Ivan.
Tolstoy's great-grandfather, Pavel Tolstoy-Miloslavsky, was Chamberlain to the last reigning Tsar, Nicholas II of Russia, who had declared his intention of creating him a Count for his services, but this was deferred due to the growing crisis in Russia during the First World War. When Grand Duke Kiril succeeded to the imperial inheritance and rights, he granted Pavel Tolstoy-Miloslavsky the title, an elevation which was approved by the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna and by Nicholas II's sisters Xenia and Olga.^{[citation needed]}

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Nina Bawden
Nina Bawden CBE (born 19 January 1925,Ilford) is a British novelist and children's writer.
Bawden grew up in Ilford in "a rather nasty housing estate that [her] mother despised". Her mother was a teacher and her father a member of the Royal Marines. After World War II broke out, she was evacuated at the age of fourteen to Aberdare, Wales. She spent school holidays at a farm in Shropshire along with her mother and her brothers.
She attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Bawden married Austen Kark, a managing director of the BBC World Service, in 1954. In 2002 Bawden was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash, in which Kark was killed. She currently lives in London and Nauplion, Greece.
Bawden's novels include Carrie's War, The Peppermint Pig, and The Witch's Daughter. A number of her works have been dramatised by BBC Children's television, and many have been translated into various languages.
In 2010 Bawden was nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize for her novel The Birds on the Trees. She and Shirley Hazzard were the only living nominees out of the six shortlisted; the award went to J.G. Farrell for his novel Troubles.

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Noel Malcolm
Noel Robert Malcolm FBA FRSL (born 26 December 1956) is a modern English historian, writer, and columnist.
Malcolm was educated at Eton College (where he was a King's Scholar), read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge (graduating with a Starred First), wrote his doctorate dissertation at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was for a time Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
He is the former foreign editor of The Spectator, and columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He gave up journalism in 1995 to become a full time writer, becoming in 2002 a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He serves on the advisory board of the conservative magazine Standpoint. He is also the general editor for the Clarendon edition of the complete works of Thomas Hobbes, and the editor of The Correspondence.
He now chairs the Board of Trustees at the Bosnian Institute, an organization in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Noel Malcolm is the author of the critically acclaimed Bosnia: A Short History (1994), Origins of English Nonsense (1997), Kosovo: A Short History (1998), Aspects of Hobbes (2002), and (with Jacqueline Stedall) John Pell (1611-1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (2005). He is the editor of The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (1994). He has also written George Enescu: His Life and Music (1990) (Toccata Press). He additionally wrote a pamphlet in 1991 titled Sense on Sovereignty, a discussion of the arguments about Britain's membership of the European Union published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

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Norman Gash
Norman Gash CBE, FRHistS, FRSL (16 January 1912, Meerut, India – 1 May 2009, Somerset) was a British historian, notable for a two volume biography of British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel.
Educated at Reading School and St John's College, Oxford, he was Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews from 1955-80 and specialised in the 19th Century.
The first volume of Gash's biography of Sir Robert Peel (Mr Secretary Peel 1961) followed his life up until 1830 and the second (Sir Robert Peel 1972) covered the majority of his political career; his successful period at the Home Office and his tenure as Prime Minister from 1841-6. Gash argued, Peel's reforms were paramount in ending the "hungry forties" and bringing about Victorian prosperity. Though Gash's interpretations of Peel have been challenged in recent decades, by historians including Boyd Hilton, this work remains the definitive Peel biography.

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Norman Sherry
Norman Sherry (born 6 July 1935 in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England) is an English born American novelist, biographer, and educator who is most well known for his three-volume biography of the British novelist Graham Greene.
Sherry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has also written on Joseph Conrad, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Jane Austen. Volume 1 of his Life of Graham Greene, and volume 2 "one of the Best Eleven Books of 1995" by the editors of The New York Review of Books.^{[citation needed]}
Since 1983, Sherry has held the post of Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
He was formerly married to the children's novelist Sylvia Sherry.

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P. J. Kavanagh
Patrick J. Kavanagh (born 6 January 1931) is an English poet, lecturer, actor and broadcaster. His father was the ITMA scriptwriter, Ted Kavanagh.
He fought in the Korean War, being evacuated as result of his injuries.
In 1966, his memoir The Perfect Stranger, based on his tragically brief marriage to Sally Phillips, the daughter of novelist Rosamund Lehmann, won the Richard Hillary Prize.
Kavanagh has written four novels for adults and two for children. His first, A Song and Dance, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1968. He was a columnist for The Spectator from 1983 to 1996 and then for The Times Literary Supplement until 2002.
In 1992 his Collected Poems were published and in the same year he was given the Cholmondeley Award for poetry. In addition he has written a travel autobiography, Finding Connections, a literary companion, Voices in Ireland and has edited The Oxford Book of Short Poems (1985), The Essential G. K. Chesterton and The Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney.
He lives in Gloucestershire.

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P. N. Furbank
Philip Nicholas Furbank FRSL (born 1920) is an English writer, scholar and critic, and a professor (now emeritus) of the Open University.
He is known for significant biographies, including E. M. Forster: A Life (1977/8), and Diderot: A Critical Biography (1992), which won a Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has also edited the works of Daniel Defoe and made major contributions to the question of attributions to Defoe in A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, and A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe all written with W. R. Owens, in addition to many others on aspects of Defoe.
He was a friend of Alan Turing, becoming his Executor, and now general editor of Turing's collected works. He is also known also as a reviewer.
Furbank's other books include one the poet Mallarmé and the painter Poussin, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966) and Behalf (1999) on political thought.

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Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra ( पंकज मिश्रा ) born 1969 in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh (North India), is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is particularly notable for his book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a sociological study of small-town India, and his writing for the New York Review of Books.
He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007-2008 at the Department of English, University College London, UK.
In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book was Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the new context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in eleven European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His recent book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.

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Patrick Marber
Patrick Albert Crispin Marber (born 19 September 1964) is an English comedian, playwright,director, puppeteer, actor and screenwriter.
Marber was born in London, England, the son of Brian Marber, a leading and highly-regarded technical analyst, and was raised in Wimbledon. He was educated at St Paul's School, Cranleigh School and Wadham College, Oxford.
After working for a few years as a stand-up comedian, Marber was a writer and cast member on the radio shows On the Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You, and their television spinoffs The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge. Amongst other roles, Marber portrayed the hapless reporter Peter O'Hanrahahanrahan in both On the Hour and The Day Today, and was involved in a dispute with the comedians Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, who had written for On the Hour, about who had invented the character. Lee and Herring's TV show Fist of Fun would later make several references to their ongoing feud with Marber, calling him a "Cornish playwright" and "Cornish curmudgeon". In Stewart Lee's 2010 book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Marber is referred to as a "new Shakespeare".

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Patrick Marnham
Patrick Marnham is an English writer, journalist and biographer. He is primarily known for his biographies, where he has covered subjects as diverse as Diego Rivera, Georges Simenon, Jean Moulin and Mary Wesley. As a journalist, he has written for Private Eye, The Independent and The Spectator among others. He served as Literary Editor of The Spectator and Paris correspondent of The Independent. His books have won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Marsh Biography Award.

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Paul Bailey
Paul Bailey (born 16 February 1937) is a British writer and critic, author of several novels as well as biographies of Cynthia Payne and Quentin Crisp.
Paul Bailey attended Sir Walter St John's Grammar School For Boys in Battersea, London. He won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1953 and worked as an actor between 1956 and 1964. He became a freelance writer in 1967.
He was appointed Literary Fellow at Newcastle and Durham Universities (1972-4), and was awarded a Bicentennial Fellowship in 1976, enabling him to travel to the USA, where he was Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at the North Dakota State University (1977-9). He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1974 and in 1978 he won the George Orwell Prize for his essay "The Limitations of Despair", first published in The Listener magazine.
Paul Bailey's novels include At The Jerusalem (1967), which is set in an old people's home, and which won a Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Writers' Award; Peter Smart's Confessions (1977) and Gabriel's Lament (1986), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; and Sugar Cane (1993), a sequel to Gabriel's Lament. Kitty and Virgil (1998) is the story of the relationship between an Englishwoman and an exiled Romanian poet. In Uncle Rudolf (2002), the narrator looks back on his colourful life and his rescue as a young boy from a likely death in fascist Romania, by his uncle, a gifted lyric tenor and the novel's eponymous hero. His latest book is "Chapman's Odyssey" (2011), in which the main character, Harry Chapman, in morphine-induced delirium, encounters characters from literature, writers, deceased friends and family members as he lies seriously ill in a London hospital. Despite his melancholy and fear, Harry entertains the nurses with recitations of some of the favourite poems he has memorised in a lifetime of reading.

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Paul Davies
Paul Charles William Davies, AM (born 22 April 1946) is an English physicist, writer and broadcaster, currently a professor at Arizona State University as well as the Director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He has held previous academic appointments at the University of Cambridge, University of London, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Adelaide and Macquarie University. His research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology. He has proposed that a one-way trip to Mars could be a viable option.
In 2005, he took up the chair of the SETI: Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup of the International Academy of Astronautics. He is also an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum.
Davies was brought up in Finchley and attended Woodhouse Grammar School on Woodhouse Road. He then studied Physics at UCL, gaining a 1st class BSc in 1967.
In 1970, he completed his PhD entitled Contributions to Theoretical Physics: (i) Radiation Damping in the Optical Continuum (ii) A Quantum Theory of Wheeler-Feynman Electrodynamics under Michael J. Seaton and Sigurd Zienau at UCL. He then carried out postdoctoral research under Fred Hoyle at Cambridge University.

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Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon (born 20 June 1951 near Portadown, Northern Ireland) is an Irish poet. He has published over thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 - 2004. At Princeton University he is both the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities and chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He is also the president of the Poetry Society (U.K.)and Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.
Muldoon was born, the eldest of three children, on a farm outside The Moy, on the boundary between County Armaghand County Tyrone, near Portadown.The family was Catholic in a largely Protestant area of Northern Ireland. His father worked as a farmer (among other jobs) and his mother was a school-mistress. In 2001, Muldoon said of the Moy
It's a beautiful part of the world. It's still the place that's 'burned into the retina', and although I haven't been back there since I left for university 30 years ago, it's the place I consider to be my home. We were a fairly non-political household; my parents were nationalists, of course, but it was not something, as I recall, that was a major area of discussion. But there were patrols; an army presence; movements of troops; a sectarian divide. And that particular area was a nationalist enclave, while next door was the parish where the Orange Order was founded; we'd hear the drums on summer evenings. But I think my mother, in particular, may have tried to shelter us from it all. Besides, we didn't really socialise a great deal. We were 'blow-ins' - arrivistes - new to the area, and didn't have a lot of connections.

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Penelope Lively
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively, DBE, FRSL (born 17 March 1933) is a prolific, popular and critically acclaimed author of fiction for both children and adults. She has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize, winning once for Moon Tiger in 1987.
Penelope Low was born in Cairo in 1933. She spent her early childhood in Egypt, before being sent to boarding school in England at the age of twelve. She read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford. She married the academic Jack Lively in 1957 and lived with him in Swansea and Oxford, among other places; he died in 1998, and Penelope Lively now lives in north London.
Her writing, like that of her peers Margaret Drabble, Nina Bawden, A. S. Byatt and others, is influenced strongly by an awareness of, and a response to, the sweeping social changes that have taken place in Britain in the course of the twentieth century.
Lively first achieved success with her children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote, was published in 1970. Since then, she has published many other books for children, achieving particular recognition with The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) for which she received the Carnegie Medal and with A Stitch in Time (1976) which won her the Whitbread Award for best children's book.

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Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd CBE (born 5 October 1949, East Acton in west London) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
Ackroyd grew up on a council estate and was raised in a "strict" Roman Catholic household. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. He was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University.
The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and re-examining the works of other London-based writers.

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Peter Conradi
Peter Conradi is a British author and journalist.
He is the author of The Red Ripper: Inside the Mind of Russia's Most Brutal Serial Killer (about Andrei Chikatilo); Mad Vlad: Vladimir Zhirinovksy and the New Russian Nationalism and Hitler's Piano Player (about Ernst Hanfstaengl a.k.a. Putzi). The Independent called Hitler's Piano Player "an exemplary piece of biographical writing".
He is co-author with Mark Logue of the best-selling book The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy, which tells the story of the friendship between King George VI and his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, that inspired the highly acclaimed film of the same name. He is also author of Royale Europe, a book about Europe's reigning royal families, which was published initially in French in May 2011.
A graduate of Oxford University (Brasenose College), Conradi also studied at Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. He was a foreign correspondent based in Brussels, Zurich, and Moscow, and became deputy foreign editor of The Sunday Times of London in 1998. He was appointed editor of Home, the newspaper's property supplement, in April 2006.

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Peter Dickinson

Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson OBE FRSL (born 16 December 1927) is an English author and poet who has written a wide variety of books, notably children's books and detective stories.
Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), but his parents moved back to England so that he and his brothers could attend English schools: Dickinson was at Eton College from 1941 to 1946. After completing his National Service (1946–48), he studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1951. For seventeen years, from 1952–1969, he worked as assistant editor, resident poet and reviewer for Punch magazine.
Dickinson has written almost fifty books, which fall into three general categories: mysteries for adults (including the James Pibble series), novels for younger readers (many of which have a fantastic or supernatural element), and a few simpler children's books.
Both of Dickinson's first crime novels won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger, Skin Deep in 1968 and A Pride of Heroes in 1969. He has been similarly successful with his children's books. He won the Guardian Award in 1977 for The Blue Hawk and the Whitbread prize for best children's book in 1979 for Tulku. In 1982 he was placed on the International Board of Books for Young People Honor List for Tulku, and The Iron Lion was selected one of New York Times Notable Books. In 1989 he won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Eva. He was also shortlisted for the Whitbread award for his book The Kin.

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Peter Nichols
Peter Nichols FRSL (born 31 July 1927) is an English writer of stage plays, film and television.
Born in Bristol, England, he was educated at Bristol Grammar School, and served his compulsory National Service as a clerk in Calcutta and later in the Combined Services Entertainments Unit in Singapore where he entertained the troops alongside John Schlesinger, Stanley Baxter, and Kenneth Williams, before going on to study acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He later claimed to have studied acting because there were no dedicated courses for playwrights . While he was working as a teacher he began to write television plays which achieved notice. His first play for the stage was The Hooded Terror, part of a season of new plays at the Little Theatre in Bristol which included Cockade by another new playwright Charles Wood. He later wrote A Day in the Death of Joe Egg for the stage because he thought it would be unacceptable for television.
Nichols' plays are hard to categorize. He is quoted as saying 'Do any damn thing you have to do to keep the heart and soul alive'.^{[citation needed]}

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Peter Scupham
Peter Scupham (born 1933 Liverpool ) is a British poet.
He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
He founded The Mandeville Press with John Mole. He lives in Norfolk, and runs a catalogue book business with Margaret Steward.

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Philip Hensher
Philip Michael Hensher FRSL (born 1965) is an English novelist, critic and journalist.
Hensher was born in South London, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School. He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before attending Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, from which he was fired over the content of an interview he gave to a gay magazine. He has published a number of novels, is a regular contributor to Granta, and he is a columnist and book reviewer for newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent.
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and has served as a judge for the Booker Prize.
In 2006, Philip Hensher was listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain, and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.

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Philip Mansel
Philip Mansel (born 1951) is a British historian and the author of a number of books about revolutionary and post-revolutionary France and the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. He was born in London in 1951 and educated at Eton College, Balliol College, Oxford, and University College London.
Mansel's first book, Louis XVIII, was published in 1981 and this - together with subsequent works such as Paris Between Empires 1814-1852 (2001) - established him on both sides of the Channel as an authority on the later French monarchy, a fact recognised by his appointment as Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Six of his books have been translated into French.
Altogether Mansel has published eleven books of history and biography, mainly relating either to France or to his other main area of interest, the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East: Sultans in Splendour was published in 1988 Constantinople: City of the World's Desire 1453-1924 in 1995 and Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean in 2010. The last two have been translated into Greek and Turkish.

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Philip Marsden
Philip Marsden also known as Philip Marsden-Smedley (born 11 May 1961,Bristol, England) is an English travel writer and novelist.
Marsden has a degree in anthropology and worked for some years for The Spectator magazine. He became a full-time writer in the late 1980s. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
A review of his work by Guy Mannes-Abbott appeared in The Independent newspaper in November 2007.
He lives in Cornwall with his wife, a writer and their children.
His books include:

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Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL (born 19 October 1946) is an English writer from Norwich. He is the best-selling author of several books, most notably his trilogy of fantasy novels, His Dark Materials, and his fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The first book of His Dark Materials has been turned into the film The Golden Compass and the first two books from his Sally Lockhart series as well as his children's novel I was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers have been adapted for television.
In 2008, The Times named Pullman in its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, the son of Audrey Evelyn Pullman (née Merrifield) and Royal Air Force pilot Alfred Outram Pullman. The family travelled with his father's job, including to Southern Rhodesia where he spent time at school.

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Philip Ziegler
Philip Sandeman Ziegler (born 24 December 1929) is a British biographer and historian.
Born in Ringwood, Ziegler was educated at St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, and went with the school when it merged with Summer Fields School, Oxford. He was afterwards at Eton College and New College, Oxford. He earned a degree in Jurisprudence with highest honours before joining the British Foreign Service, in which he served in Laos, Pretoria and Bogotá, as well as with the Delegation to NATO in Paris.
In 1967 he retired from the Foreign Service, and joined Collins. Originally intending to be a novelist, he began a career as biographer with his life of Talleyrand's lover, the Duchess of Dino. He was editor in chief at Collins from 1979-80. He has written in various journals and newspapers including The Spectator, The Listener, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and History Today.

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Piers Brendon
Piers Brendon (born 21 December 1940, Stratton, Cornwall) is a British writer, known for historical and biographical works. He was educated at Shrewsbury School, Shropshire, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read History. He earned his Ph.D for his thesis, Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement, which was published, with much modification, in 1974.
From 1965-78, Dr. Brendon was Lecturer in History, then Principal Lecturer and Head of Department, at what is now Anglia Polytechnic University. From 1979 onwards he has worked as a free-lance writer - books, journalism and television and from 1995 he has been a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge and was Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre from 1995 to 2001, taking over from Correlli Barnett. He was succeeded by Allen Packwood.

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Piers Paul Read
Piers Paul Read, FRSL (born 7 March 1941) is a British novelist and non-fiction writer.
Piers Paul Read was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. He is the third son of Sir Herbert Read, a poet, art critic and theorist of anarchism, and Margaret (née Ludwig) Read, a professional musician. His mother was a convert to Roman Catholicism and he was raised in that religion.
When Read was eight, his family moved to North Yorkshire. He was educated by Benedictine monks at Gilling Castle and Ampleforth College. His years at Ampleforth would later provide much of the material for the first part of his third novel Monk Dawson (1969) and rural Ryedale was the setting of his fifth novel, The Upstart (1973). In 1959 he went to St John's College, Cambridge, where he read history. He received his B.A. in 1961 and M.A. in 1962. In 1963–64, he spent a year in West Berlin on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. There he made friends with two other beneficiaries of the Ford Foundation, Tom Stoppard and Derek Marlowe, and worked on his first novel Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1966).

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Posy Simmonds
Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds MBE (born 9 August 1945) is a British newspaper cartoonist and writer and illustrator of children's books. She is best known for her long association with The Guardian, for which she has drawn the cartoons Gemma Bovery (2000) and Tamara Drewe (2005–06), both later published as books. Her style gently satirises the English middle classes and in particular those of a literary bent. Both of the published books feature a "doomed heroine", much in the style of the 18th- and 19th-century gothic romantic novel, to which they often allude, but with an ironic, modernist slant.
Posy Simmonds was born in Berkshire and educated at Queen Anne's School, Caversham. She studied at the Sorbonne before returning to London to attend Central School of Art & Design. She started her newspaper career drawing a daily cartoon, “Bear”, for The Sun in 1969. She contributed humorous illustrations to The Times from 1968 to 1970. She also contributed to Cosmopolitan, and a satirical cartoon to Tariq Ali's Black Dwarf magazine. She moved to The Guardian as an illustrator in 1972.

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Rab Butler
Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, KG CH DL PC (9 December 1902 – 8 March 1982), who invariably signed his name R. A. Butler and was familiarly known as Rab, was a British Conservative politician. Butler was one of only two British politicians (the other being John Simon, 1st Viscount Simon) to have served in three of the four Great Offices of State (Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary) but never to have achieved the Premiership, for which he was twice passed over.
Butler was born in Attock Serai, Attock in India (now Punjab, Pakistan) to Sir Montagu Sherard Dawes Butler and his wife, Anne Gertrude (née Smith). His maternal uncles were Charles Aitchison Smith, Sir George Adam Smith and Sir James Dunlop Smith. His father later remarried and thus he gained a half-sister, Iris Mary Butler, who became Iris Portal upon her marriage.
Butler's was a family of Cambridge dons and Indian Governors; as a child his right arm was injured in a riding accident, leaving his hand never again fully functional. His limp handshake and inevitable lack of military experience (and stooping donnish manner at a time when many politicians were former officers) were political handicaps in later life. He was educated at Marlborough College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was President of the Cambridge Union Society in the summer term of his third year; in March 1924, as a newly-elected President, he entertained the Opposition Leader Stanley Baldwin at a debate.

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Raymond Briggs
Raymond Redvers Briggs (born 18 January 1934) is an English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author, who has achieved critical and popular success among adults and children. He is best known for his story The Snowman, which is shown every Christmas on British television in cartoon form and on the stage as a musical.
Raymond Briggs was born in Wimbledon, London, England, to parents Ethel and Ernest Briggs, a lady's maid and a milkman. He attended Rutlish School for Boys (then a grammar school), pursued cartooning from an early age and, despite his father's attempts to discourage him from this unprofitable pursuit, attended the Wimbledon School of Art from 1949 to 1953 to study painting, and Central School of Art to study typography.
From 1953 to 1955 he was a conscript in the Royal Corps of Signals at Catterick where he was made a draughtsman. After these two years of National Service, he returned to the study of painting at Slade School of Fine Art at University College, London, graduating in 1957.

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Raymond Carr
Sir Albert Raymond Maillard Carr FBA FRHS FRSL (born 11 April 1919), known as Raymond Carr, is an English historian specializing in the history of Spain, Latin America, and Sweden who was Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford, from 1968 to 1987.
Born at Bath, Somerset, the son of Reginald Henry Maillard Carr and Marion Maillard Carr, he was educated at Brockenhurst School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was elected Gladstone Research Exhibitioner in 1941.
Carr was briefly a lecturer at University College, London, in 1945–1946, before returning to Oxford as a Fellow of All Souls College, 1946–1953. He was next a Fellow of New College, 1953–1964, then Director of Oxford's Latin American Centre, 1964–1968 and the University's Professor of the History of Latin America, 1967–68.
He became a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1964, Sub-Warden of the college in 1966 and Warden in 1968, a position he held until his retirement in 1987. After his retirement from Oxford, he was King Juan Carlos Professor of Spanish History at New York University in 1992.

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Reginald Hill
Reginald Charles Hill FRSL (3 April 1936 – 12 January 2012) was an English crime writer, and the winner in 1995 of the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement.
Hill was born to a "very ordinary" family—his father was a professional footballer long before sportsmen earned riches—but began reading young. His mother was a great fan of Golden Age crime writers, and he discovered the genre while fetching her library-books. He passed the Eleven plus exam and attended Carlisle Grammar School where he excelled in English. After National Service (1955–57) and reading English at St Catherine's College, Oxford University (1957–60) he worked as a teacher for many years, rising to Senior Lecturer at Doncaster College of Education. In 1980 he retired from salaried work in order to devote himself full-time to writing.
Hill is best known for his more than 20 novels featuring the Yorkshire detectives Andrew Dalziel /diːˈɛl/, Peter Pascoe and Edgar Wield. The characters were used by the BBC in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, in which Dalziel was played by Warren Clarke, Pascoe by Colin Buchanan, and Wield by David Royle. He also wrote more than 30 other novels, including five featuring Joe Sixsmith, a black machine operator turned private detective in a fictional Luton. Novels originally published under the pseudonyms of Patrick Ruell, Dick Morland, and Charles Underhill have now appeared under his own name. Hill was also a writer of short stories and ghost tales.

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Richard Adams
Richard George Adams (born 9 May 1920) is an English novelist who is best known as the author of Watership Down. He studied modern history at university before serving in the British Army during World War II. He completed his studies after the war and joined the English Civil Service. In 1974, two years after Watership Down was published, Adams became a full-time author. He is now semi-retired.
Adams was born on 9 May 1920 in Wash Common near Newbury, Berkshire, United Kingdom. He attended Horris Hill School from 1926–1933, and then Bradfield College from 1933–1938. In 1938, he went to Worcester College, Oxford to read Modern History. In July 1940, shortly after the declaration of war between the UK and Germany, Adams was called up to join the British Army. He served in the Middle East and India, but saw no action against either the Germans or the Japanese.
After being released from the army in 1946, Adams returned to Worcester College to continue his studies for a further two years. He took the degrees of Bachelor of Arts in 1948 and Master of Arts in 1953. After his BA graduation in 1948, Adams joined the British Civil Service and held the rank of Assistant Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, later part of the Department of the Environment. It was during this period that he began writing fiction in his spare time.

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Richard Barber
Richard William Barber FRSL FSA FRHistS (born 1941) is a British historian who has been writing and publishing in the field of medieval history and literature ever since his student days. He has specialised in Arthurian legend, beginning with a general survey, Arthur of Albion (1961) which is still in print in a revised edition. His other major interest is historical biography; he has published on Henry Plantagenet (1964) and among his other books is the standard biography of Edward, the Black Prince, Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitaine. The interplay between history and literature was the theme of The Knight and Chivalry, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1971 and he returned to this theme in The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (2004); this was widely praised in the UK press, and had major reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is currently working on a group biography of the first knights of the Order of the Garter.
Barber's other career has been as a publisher. In 1969 he helped to found The Boydell Press, which later became Boydell & Brewer Ltd, one of the leading publishers in medieval studies, and was group managing director until 2009. In 1989, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, in association with the University of Rochester, started the University of Rochester Press in upstate New York. The group currently publishes over 200 titles a year.

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Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.
Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.

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Richard Eyre
Sir Richard Charles Hastings Eyre CBE (born 28 March 1943) is an English director of film, theatre, television, and opera.
Eyre was educated at Sherborne School, an independent school for boys in the market town of Sherborne in north-west Dorset in south-west England, followed by Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge and Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. Eyre became the first President of Rose Bruford College in July 2010. He lives in Brook Green, West London.
Eyre was Associate Director at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh from 1967 to 1972. He won STV Awards for the Best Production in Scotland in 1969, 1970 and 1971. He was artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse from 1973-78 where he commissioned and directed many new plays, including Trevor Griffith's Comedians.
Eyre was director of the National Theatre (which became the Royal National Theatre during his time there) between 1987 and 1997, having previously directed a noted revival of Guys and Dolls for the venue in 1982 with Olivier Award-winner Julia McKenzie and Bob Hoskins. He repeated this production in 1996 with Imelda Staunton and Joanna Riding. His diaries during this time have been published as National Service and won the 2003 Theatre Book Prize.

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Richard Hoggart
Herbert Richard Hoggart FRSL (born 24 September 1918) is a British academic whose career has covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture.
He was born in Leeds and educated at Cockburn High School and the University of Leeds. He served with the Royal Artillery during World War II and was demobilised as a Staff Captain. He was appointed Staff Tutor at the University of Hull from 1946 to 1959 and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester from 1959 to 1962.
The Uses of Literacy [1] (1957) is Hoggart's most cited work. Partly autobiography, it was interpreted as lamenting the loss of an authentic popular culture and denouncing the imposition of a mass culture by the culture industries.
Hoggart was an expert witness at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, and his argument that it was an essentially moral and "puritan" work, which merely repeated words he had heard on a building site on his way to the court, is sometimes viewed as having had a decisive influence on the outcome of the trial.

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Richard J. Evans
Richard John Evans (born 29 September 1947) is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.
Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History (Cambridge) at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College. Evans applied for the distinguished Cambridge position, whereas his predecessors were chosen — marking a procedural change at Cambridge. Evans has also taught at the University of Stirling, University of East Anglia and Birkbeck College, London. Having been a Visiting Professor in History at Gresham College during 2008/09, he is now the Gresham Professor of Rhetoric.
He was educated at Forest School, Jesus College, Oxford (MA), and St Antony's College, Oxford (DPhil) and the University of East Anglia (LittD). In a 2004 interview, Evans stated that frequent visits to Wales during his childhood inspired both an interest in history and a sense of "otherness".
As an undergraduate, Evans was much influenced by the History Workshop school, which was in its founding phase at Oxford while he was studying there, and by the English Marxist historians. He was also influenced by E.H. Carr's What Is History?

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Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett (born Chicago, 1 January 1943) is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Sennett is probably best known for his studies of social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world.
He has been a Fellow of The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. In 2006 Sennett was the winner of the Hegel Prize awarded by the German city of Stuttgart, and in 2008 was awarded the Gerda Henkel Prize, worth 100,000 Euros, by the Gerda Henkel Foundation of Düsseldorf, Germany.
He is married to sociologist Saskia Sassen.
Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, coming from a family of Russian emigres. As a child he trained in music, studying the cello and conducting, working with Claus Adam of the Juilliard String Quartet and the conductor Pierre Monteux. When a hand injury put an end to his musical career, he entered academic life. He trained with David Riesman, Erik Erikson, and Oscar Handlin at Harvard, graduating with his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization in 1969. His intellectual life as an urbanist came into focus during the time he spent as a fellow of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and MIT.

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Robert Conquest
George Robert Acworth Conquest CMG (born 15 July 1917) is an Anglo-American historian and poet best known for his influential works of Soviet history which include The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Robert Conquest was born in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, the son of an American of independent means and an English mother. His father served in an American Ambulance Service unit with the French Army in World War I, being awarded the Croix de Guerre with silver star in 1916. Conquest was educated at Winchester College, the University of Grenoble, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was an exhibitioner in modern history and took his bachelor's and master's degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and his doctorate in Soviet history.
In 1937, after studying at the University of Grenoble, Conquest went up to Oxford, joining both the Carlton Club and, as an 'open' member, the Communist Party of Great Britain. Fellow members included Denis Healey and Philip Toynbee.

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Robert Macfarlane
Robert MacFarlane or Robert McFarlane may refer to:

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Robert Nye
Robert Nye FRSL (born 1939) is an English poet who has also written novels and plays as well as stories for children. His bestselling novel Falstaff published in 1976 was described by Michael Ratcliffe (writing in the Times) as 'one of the most ambitious and seductive novels of the decade,' and went on to win both The Hawthornden Prize and Guardian Prize for fiction. The novel was also included in Anthony Burgess's '99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939' (1984).
Robert Nye was born in London in 1939. His father was a civil servant, his mother a farmer's daughter. He attended Southend High School for Boys and had published his first poem 'Kingfisher' in the London Magazine (September 1955; Volume 2, Number 9) by the age of sixteen. He left school in 1955 and did not pursue additional formal study. Nye's poetry has appeared in a number of important literary magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Encounter and The Listener. The 1964 Fall and Winter issues of the Canadian publication The Fiddlehead contained respectively fifteen and eighteen of his poems.

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Robert Skidelsky
Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky FBA (born 25 April 1939 in Harbin, China), is a British economic historian of Russian origin and the author of an award-winning major three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. He read history at Jesus College, Oxford. He is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, England.
Skidelsky's parents, Boris Skidelsky and Galia Sapelkin, were British subjects of Russian ancestry, Jewish on his father's side and Christian on his mother's. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, and finally released in exchange for Japanese internees in England. Then he went back to China with his parents in 1947, living for a little over a year in Tientsin (now Tianjin). They left for Hong Kong just before the Communists took the city.
From 1953 to 1958, he was a boarder at Brighton College. He went on to read history at Jesus College, Oxford. From 1961 to 1969, he was successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967, he published his first book, Politicians and the Slump, based on his D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in which British politicians handled the Great Depression.

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Robin Lane Fox
Robin James Lane Fox FRSL (born 5 October 1946) is an English historian of classical antiquity, described by Paul Cartledge as "one of our most original, daring and arguably life-enhancing". He is Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College, Oxford (of which he is also Garden Fellow and Tutor in Oriental Studies) and Reader in Ancient History, University of Oxford. He is Lecturer in Ancient History at Exeter College, Oxford. He has also taught Greek and Latin literature and early Islamic history, a subject in which he held an Oxford Research Fellowship.
His major publications, for which he has won literary prizes including the James Tait Black Award, the Duff Cooper Prize, the W. H. Heinemann Award and the Runciman Award, include studies of Alexander the Great and Ancient Macedon, Late Antiquity (e.g. on Christianity and Paganism), the Bible and history, and the Greek Dark Ages (e.g. on the relation between Greek Mythology and the myths of the Ancient Near East).
Lane Fox was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow 1970-73. Like his fellow historians Paul Cartledge and Alan Cameron, and philosophers Terence Irwin and John McDowell, he was an undergraduate student of G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, whom he succeeded at New College in 1977 after a lectureship and Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford. Other important influences on his unusually wide-ranging contributions to the study of ancient history include Louis Robert,Peter Brown,E.R. Dodds,Timothy Barnes, E. J. Bickerman,Martin Litchfield West,Walter Burkert, and his long-standing New College colleague W. G. (George) Forrest.

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Robin Robertson
Robin Robertson, FRSL (born in Scone, Perthshire 1955) is a Scottish poet.
<poem> Selkie (Written in memory of Michael Donaghy)
"I'm not stopping," he said, shrugging off his skin like a wet-suit, then stretching it on the bodhran's frame, "let's play." And he played till dawn: all the jigs and reels he knew, before he stood and drained the last from his glass, slipped back in to the seal-skin, into a new day, saluting us with that famous grin: "That's me away." </poem>
Robertson was brought up on the north-east coast of Scotland, but has spent most of his professional life in London. After working as an editor at Penguin Books and Secker and Warburg, he became poetry and fiction editor at Jonathan Cape.
Robertson's poetry appears regularly in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and is represented in many anthologies. In 2004, he edited Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame, which collects seventy commissioned pieces by international authors. In 2006 he published The Deleted World, new versions of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, and in 2008 a new translation of Medea, which has been dramatised for stage and radio. Robertson is a trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

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Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle (Irish: Ruaidhrí Ó Dúill; born 8 May 1958 in Dublin) is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into successful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. He was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993.
Doyle grew up in Kilbarrack, Dublin. His mother, Ita Bolger Doyle, was first cousin of the short story writer Maeve Brennan. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from University College Dublin. He spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer in 1993.
He established a creative writing centre, "Fighting Words", which opened in Dublin in January 2009. It was inspired by a visit to his friend Dave Eggers' 826 Valencia project in San Francisco. His personal notes and work books reside at the National Library of Ireland.
He is an atheist. He signed a petition supporting journalist Suzanne Breen, who faced gaol for refusing to divulge her sources in court. He joined thousands of angry people from Clontarf to protest against an attempt by Dublin City Council to construct 9ft-high barriers which would interfere with one of his favourite views.

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Roger Lonsdale
Roger Lonsdale is a British Author, and has been a Fellow and Tutor at Balliol College Oxford.

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Roger McGough
Roger Joseph McGough CBE (born 9 November 1937) is a well-known English performance poet. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Poetry Please and records voice-overs for commercials, as well as performing his own poetry regularly. He is a Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University and is a Vice President of the Poetry Society.
Roger McGough was born in Litherland, Liverpool. He was a pupil at St Mary's College in Crosby with Laurie Taylor, future sociologist and criminologist, before going on to study French and Geography at the University of Hull at a time when Philip Larkin was the librarian there. Returning to Merseyside in the early 1960s, he worked as a French teacher and, with John Gorman, organised arts events. After meeting Mike McGear the trio formed The Scaffold, working the Edinburgh Festival until they signed to Parlophone records in 1966. The group scored several hit records, reaching number one in the UK Singles Chart in 1968 with their version of "Lily The Pink". McGough wrote the lyrics for many of the group's songs and also recorded the musical comedy/poetry album McGough and McGear.

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Roger Scruton
Roger Vernon Scruton (born 27 February 1944) is a conservative English philosopher and writer. He is the author of over 30 books, including Art and Imagination (1974), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006). He has also written several novels and two operas.
Scruton was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992. In 1982 he helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years. Since 1992 he has held part-time positions at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the University of St Andrews, and the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia—a school affiliated with the Legion of Christ, a conservative Catholic religious congregation. He also founded the Claridge Press in 1987, and sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics. He serves in addition as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for European Renewal.

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Rohinton Mistry
Rohinton Mistry (born 3 July 1952) is an Indian-born Canadian writer in English. Residing in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, Mistry is of Indian origin, originally from Mumbai. He practices Zoroastrianism and belongs to the Parsi community. Mistry is a Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate (2012).
Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Mumbai, India. He earned a BA in Mathematics and Economics at the University of Mumbai. He emigrated to Canada with his wife in 1975, settling in Toronto where he studied at the University of Toronto and received a BA in English and Philosophy. He worked in a bank for a while, before returning to studies, leading up to a degree in English and philosophy. While attending the University of Toronto he won two Hart House literary prizes (the first to win two), for stories which were published in the Hart House Review, and Canadian Fiction Magazine's annual Contributor's Prize for 1985. Two years later, Penguin Books Canada published his collection of 11 short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag. It was later published in the United States as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag. The book consists of 11 short stories, all set within one apartment complex in modern-day Mumbai. This volume contains the oft-anthologized story, "Swimming Lessons."

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Roland Huntford
Roland Huntford (born 1927) is an author, principally of biographies of Polar explorers. He lives in Cambridge, and was formerly Scandinavian correspondent of The Observer, also acting as their winter sports correspondent. He was the 1986–87 Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford.
He has written biographies of Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Nobel Peace Prize winner Fridtjof Nansen. Huntford's controversial The Last Place on Earth (originally titled Scott and Amundsen) had a tremendous impact on public interest in Polar matters.^{[citation needed]}
Huntford put forth the point of view that Roald Amundsen's success in reaching the South Pole was abetted by much superior planning, whereas errors by Scott (notably including the reliance on man-hauling instead of sled dogs) ultimately resulted in the death of Scott and his companions.
Defenders of Scott's actions, notably Ranulph Fiennes, assert that Huntford, who lacks direct experience of Polar travel and man-hauling, is not qualified to draw the conclusions he does on Scott's alleged technical deficiencies. In his biography of Captain Scott, Fiennes offers a rebuttal of some of Huntford's assertions of Scott's deficiencies.The Coldest March (2001) by Susan Solomon disputes many of Huntford's conclusions on Scott's leadership and skill by analysing scientific and particularly meteorological data.^{[page needed]}

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Romesh Gunesekera
Romesh Gunesekera FRSL is a British author with a Sri Lankan background.
Born in Colombo in 1954, Romesh Gunesekera explores aspects of his native island. He grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, moving to England in 1971. His first book, Monkfish Moon, a collection of short stories reflecting the ethnic and political tensions that have threatened Sri Lanka since independence in 1948, was published in 1992. His novel Reef was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Gunesekera lives in London, but travels widely for festivals, workshops and British Council tours. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature. He is currently one of the writers-in-residence for the charity First Story.
Biography, bibliography and critical perspective of the author at contemporarywriters.com

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Ronald Blythe
Ronald Blythe (born 1922) is an English writer and editor, best known^{[citation needed]} in his native England for his Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), a portrait of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s. As editor of Penguin Classics for more than 20 years, Blythe has edited modern editions of works by writers such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James and William Hazlitt. He has also prepared a number of compilations, including The Pleasure of Diaries (1989) and Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War (1993).
Blythe was awarded a Benson Medal in 2006.
Blythe was born in Suffolk, England and educated in Sudbury, Suffolk. He was a reference librarian in Colchester for ten years, where he founded the Colchester Literary Society. While a young man, he worked for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival.
Blythe has lived in East Anglia since 1955 when he became a writer full time. He is an Anglican and contributes regular articles to the Church Times.

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Ronald Harwood
Sir Ronald Harwood CBE (born 9 November 1934) is an author, playwright and screenwriter. He is most noted for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
Harwood was born Ronald Horwitz in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of Isobel (née Pepper) and Isaac Horwitz. Harwood moved from Cape Town to London in 1951 to pursue a career in the theatre. He changed his name from Horwitz after an English master told him it was too foreign and too Jewish for a stage actor. After training for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he joined the Shakespeare Company of Sir Donald Wolfit. From 1953 to 1958, Harwood was Sir Donald's personal dresser. He would later draw on this experience when he wrote the stage play, The Dresser, and the biography, Sir Donald Wolfit CBE: His life and work in the Unfashionable Theatre. In 1959, after leaving the Wolfit company. he joined the 59 Theatre Company for a season at the Lyric Hammersmith.

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Rory MacLean
Rory MacLean (born 1954) is a Canadian travel writer living in the UK and Berlin whose best known works are Stalin’s Nose, a black and surreal travelogue through eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Magic Bus, a history of the Asia Overland hippie trail.
MacLean was born in Vancouver and grew up in Toronto, graduating from Upper Canada College and Ryerson University. For ten years he made movies with moderate success, working with David Hemmings and Ken Russell in England, David Bowie in Berlin and Marlene Dietrich in Paris. In 1989 he won The Independent inaugural travel writing competition and changed from screen to prose writing. After completing eight travel books in the UK he is now writing a book on Berlin where he is also a blogger for the Meet the Germans website of the Goethe-Institut. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
MacLean’s first book, Stalin's Nose (1992), told the story of a journey from Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant and became a UK top ten best-seller, winning the Yorkshire Post's Best First Work prize. William Dalrymple called it, ‘the most extraordinary debut in travel writing since Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia’.Colin Thubron considered the book to be ‘a surreal masterpiece’.

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Rory Stewart
Roderick 'Rory' James Nugent Stewart OBE FRSL MP (born 3 January 1973) is a British academic, author, and Conservative politician. Since May 2010, he has been the Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border, in the county of Cumbria, North West England.
Stewart was a senior coalition official in a province of occupied Iraq in 2003-2004. He is known for his book about this experience, The Prince of the Marshes (also published under the title Occupational Hazards) and for his 2002 walk, lasting 32 days, across Afghanistan, which served as the basis for another book, The Places in Between, as well as his later cultural development work in Afghanistan as the Executive Chairman of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a British charity.
He also served for nine months on his gap year in the Black Watch regiment of the British Army and in the British Foreign Service, where he worked as a diplomat in Indonesia and the Balkans.
Stewart, whose family hails from Crieff in Perthshire, Scotland, was born in Hong Kong, raised in Malaysia and Scotland and educated at the Dragon School, Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied modern history and politics, philosophy and economics (PPE). He graduated with a First and while a student at Oxford, he was a summer tutor to Prince William and Prince Harry. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Stirling, as well as from The American University of Paris. As a teenager, he was a member of the Labour Party.

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Rosalind Belben
Rosalind Belben is an English novelist. She was born in 1941 in Dorset where she now lives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novel Our Horses in Egypt won the James Tait Black Award in 2007. Among her other books are Bogies, Reuben Little Hero, The Limit, Dreaming of Dead People, and Hound Music.

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Rose Tremain
Rose Tremain CBE (born August 2, 1943) is an English author.
Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson on August 2, 1943 in London and attended Francis Holland School then Crofton Grange School from 1954 to 1961; the Sorbonne from 1961–1962; and graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1965, where she taught creative writing from 1988 to 1995.
She married Jon Tremain in 1971 and they had one daughter, Eleanor, born in 1972, who became an actress. The marriage lasted about five years. Her second marriage, to theatre director Jonathan Dudley, in 1982, lasted about nine years; and she has been with Richard Holmes since 1992. She lives in Norfolk.
Her influences include William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1967 novel, 100 Years of Solitude and the magical realism style.
Her novel Music and Silence won the best novel in the 1999 Whitbread Awards, building on the recognition she received in the award of the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year for her novel Restoration, and the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Sacred Country. Tremain also won the Prix Femina Étranger in 1994 for Sacred Country. She is an historical novelist who approaches her subjects "from unexpected angles, concentrating her attention on unglamorous outsiders."

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Rosemary Hill
Rosemary Hill is an English writer and historian.
She has published widely on 19th and 20th century cultural history, but she is best known for God's Architect, her multi-award-winning biography of Augustus Pugin. Published in 2007, it won the Wolfson History Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the Elizabeth Longford Prize, and the Marsh Biography Award. Hill is a trustee of the Victorian Society, sits on the editorial board of the London Review of Books and is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
She is the widow of the poet Christopher Logue, whom she married in 1985.

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Rowan Williams
Rowan Douglas Williams FBA, FRSL, FLSW (born 14 June 1950) is an Anglican bishop, poet and theologian. He is the 104th and current Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan of the Province of Canterbury and Primate of All England, offices he has held since early 2003.
Williams was previously Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales (making him the first Archbishop of Canterbury in modern times not to be appointed from within the Church of England) and had spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively. His primacy has been marked by much speculation that the Anglican Communion (in which the Archbishop of Canterbury is the leading figure) is on the verge of fragmentation and by Williams's attempts to keep all sides talking to one another. On 16 March 2012, it was announced that he has accepted the position of Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University, beginning in January 2013. He is expected to stand down as Archbishop of Canterbury in December 2012.

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Roy Fisher
Roy Fisher (born 1930) is a British poet and jazz pianist. He was one of the first British writers to absorb the poetics of William Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain poets into the British poetic tradition. Fisher was a key precursor of the British Poetry Revival.
Fisher was born in Handsworth, Birmingham and studied at the University of Birmingham. His early work, including City (1961), a work in which he applies the lessons of Williams' Paterson to the city of Birmingham, was admired in the United States but more or less ignored in his native country. It was because of the negative connotations for outsiders of "Birmingham" that the city's name did not once appear in his early long poem City .. In 2005 Roy Fisher was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Fisher finally began to gain recognition in Britain with the publication of Poems 1955-1980 (1981). Between 1963 and 1971, he worked as Head of English and Drama at Bordesley College of Education. He then moved to the Department of American Studies at Keele University. He retired in 1982, after which he worked as a freelance writer and as a musician.

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Roy Hattersley
Roy Sydney George Hattersley, Baron Hattersley FRSL (born 28 December 1932) is a British Labour politician, author and journalist from Sheffield. He served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992.
Roy Hattersley has been a socialist and Labour supporter from his youth, electioneering at the age of 12 for his local MP and city councillors, beginning in 1945. His own mother, Enid Hattersley, was a city councillor, and later, Lord Mayor of Sheffield (in 1981). Enid Hattersley kept the fact secret from her son (until he was in his 50s) that his father, who died an atheist, had been a Roman Catholic priest, Father Frederick Hattersley, and had renounced the Church to marry her.
He won a scholarship to Sheffield City Grammar School and went from there to study at the University of Hull. Having been accepted to read English at the University of Leeds, he was diverted into reading Economics when told by a Sheffield colleague of his mother that it was necessary for a political career.

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Roy Jenkins
Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM, PC (11 November 1920 – 5 January 2003) was a British politician.
The son of a Welsh coal miner who later became a union official and Labour MP, Roy Jenkins served with distinction in World War II. Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, he served in several major posts in Harold Wilson's First Government. As Home Secretary from 1965–1967, he sought to build what he described as "a civilized society", with measures such as the effective abolition in Britain of capital punishment and theatre censorship, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, relaxing of divorce law, suspension of birching and the legalisation of abortion. As Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1967–1970, he pursued a tight fiscal policy later praised by Margaret Thatcher. In 1970, he was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, but resigned in 1972 because he supported entry to the Common Market, while the party opposed it.
When Wilson re-entered government in 1974 Jenkins returned to the Home Office, but, increasingly disenchanted by the swing to the left of the Labour Party,^{[citation needed]} he chose to leave British politics in 1976 and was appointed President of the European Commission in 1977, serving until 1981: he was the first and to date only British holder of this office. In 1981, dismayed with the Labour Party's continuing leftward drift, he was one of the "Gang of Four" - Labour moderates who formed the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In 1982 he won a famous by-election in a Conservative seat and returned to parliament; but after disappointment with the performance of the SDP in the 1983 election he resigned as SDP leader.

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Roy Strong
Sir Roy Colin Strong FRSL (born 23 August 1935) is an English art historian, museum curator, writer, broadcaster and landscape designer. He has been director of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He was knighted in 1983.
Roy Colin Strong was born in Winchmore Hill, North London and attended Edmonton County School in Edmonton.
He earned a first class honours degree in history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He then earned his Ph.D from the Warburg Institute, University of London and became a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. His passionate interest in the portraiture of Queen Elizabeth I was sidelined "while he wrote a thesis on Elizabethan Court Pageantry supervised by the Renaissance scholar, Dame Frances Yates “who (he says) restructured and re-formed my thinking.” In 2007 Strong lists his qualifications as, DLitt PhD FSS.
He became assistant keeper of the National Portrait Gallery in 1959, and was its director 1967-73: Sir Roy came to prominence at age 32 when he became the youngest director of the National Portrait Gallery. He set about transforming its conservative image with a series of extrovert shows, including "600 Cecil Beaton portraits 1928-1968." Dedicated to the culture of the 1960s and 1970s, Sir Roy went on to amuse audiences at the V&A in 1974 with his collection of fedora hats, kipper ties and maxi coats. By regularly introducing new exhibitions he doubled attendance.

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Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (

/ˈrʌdjəd ˈkɪplɪŋ/ RUD-yəd KIP-ling; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling is best known for his works of fiction, including The Jungle Book (a collection of stories which includes "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"), Just So Stories (1902) (1894), Kim (1901) (a tale of adventure), many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888); and his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The White Man's Burden (1899) and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and his best works are said to exhibit "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

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Rupert Christiansen
Rupert Christiansen (born 1954) is an English writer, journalist and critic, grandson of Arthur Christiansen (editor of the Daily Express) and son of Kay and Michael Christiansen (editor of the Sunday and Daily Mirror). Born in London, he was educated at Millfield and King's College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in English. As a Fulbright scholar, he also attended Columbia University from 1977 to 1978.
He has written a number of books, including a biography of Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, and won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988 for Romantic Affinities. He has also written for many British and American newspapers and periodicals, including The Spectator, Harper's and Queen, Vanity Fair, Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review. Formerly arts editor of Harper's and Queen and deputy arts editor of The Observer, he has been opera critic and arts columnist of the Daily Telegraph and dance critic of The Mail on Sunday since 1996. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997. He sits on the boards of Opera magazine, the Charleston Trust and the Gate Theatre. In 2010, he was appointed to the international jury of the Birgit Nilsson Prize.

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Russell Hoban
Russell Conwell Hoban (February 4, 1925 – December 13, 2011) was an American expatriate writer of fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magic realism, poetry, and children's books.
Hoban was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, to Jewish immigrants from Ostrog (now in Ukraine). His father, Abram T. Hoban, was the advertising manager of the Jewish Daily Forward Yiddish-language newspaper and the director of The Drama Guild of the Labor Institute of the Workmen's Circle of Philadelphia. He died when his son was 11, and Russell was raised by his mother, Jeanette Dimmerman. He was named for Russell Conwell. After briefly attending Temple University, he enlisted in the Army at age 18 and served in the Philippines and Italy as a radio operator during World War II, earning a bronze star. During his military service, he married his first wife, Lillian Aberman, who later became a writer and illustrator in her own right. They had four children before divorcing in 1975.

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Ruth Fainlight
Ruth Fainlight (born 2 May 1931, New York City, U.S.), is a poet, short story writer, translator and librettist.
Fainlight was born in New York, but has mainly lived in England since she was fifteen, having also spent some years living in France and Spain. She studied for two years at the Birmingham and Brighton Colleges of Arts and Crafts. In addition to her own works, Fainlight has also provided criticism for BBC Radio, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and numerous other publications.
She was married to the British writer Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) and has a son, David, who is a photographer for The Guardian and an adopted daughter, Susan. She lives in London.
She has twice been Poet in Residence at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee and was a close friend of Sylvia Plath's in the years leading up to Plath's death.
tr. M. Rosenberg & D. Samoilovich, Cosmopoetica, Cordoba, Spain
The poem "Sugar-Paper Blue" was translated into Russian by Marina Boroditskaya and is published in the April 2003 issue of the Moscow monthly Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature).

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Ruth Padel
Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS (

/pəˈdɛl/ pə-DEL) (born 8 May 1946) is an award-winning British poet, a non-fiction author known for her poetry criticism, nature writing and connections with science; and more recently a novelist. She broadcasts on poetry, literature, music and wildlife for BBC Radio 3 and 4.
Padel is daughter of psychoanalyst John Hunter Padel and Hilda, daughter of Sir (James) Alan Noel Barlow 2nd Baronet and Nora Barlow, née Darwin, grand-daughter of Charles Darwin, through whom Padel is Darwin's great-great-grandchild. Her brother is historian Oliver Padel; cousins include prison reformer Una Padel, sculptor Phyllida Barlow and biographer Randal Keynes. Her uncle is Horace Barlow. Padel was born in Wimpole Street where her great-grandfather Sir Thomas Barlow practised medicine. She attended North London Collegiate School, studied classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford where she sang in the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, wrote a PhD on Greek poetry, and was first Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford, which altered its Statutes for her to accommodate female Fellows. She was thus among the first women to become Fellows of formerly all-male Oxford colleges. She taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, University of London, taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton University, has lived extensively in Greece, and in Paris where she sang in the Choir of Église Saint-Eustache, Paris. Her publishing career began in 1985, while she was teaching Greek at Birkbeck College, with a poetry pamphlet. Later she left academe to support herself by reviewing and publish her first collection, 1990.She was married to philosopher Myles Burnyeat.

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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE (born 7 May 1927) is a Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer, and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant. Their films won six Academy Awards.
She was born Ruth Prawer in Cologne, Germany to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's biggest synagogue. The family fled the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain. Her elder brother, Siegbert Salomon (1925–2012), was honorary fellow of The Queen's College and professor emeritus of German at the University of Oxford, an expert on Heine and horror films.
During World War II she lived in Hendon in London, experienced the Blitz and began to speak English rather than German. She became a British citizen in 1948. She received her MA in English literature from Queen Mary College, University of London in 1951. She also married Cyrus H. Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect, in 1951.

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Ruth Rendell
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE, (born 17 February 1930), who also writes under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, is an English crime writer, author of psychological thrillers and murder mysteries.
In addition to police procedurals starring her most iconic creation, Chief Inspector Wexford, Rendell writes psychological crime novels exploring such themes as romantic obsession, misperceived communication, the impact of chance and coincidence, and the humanity of the criminals involved. Among such books are A Judgement In Stone, The Face of Trespass, Live Flesh, Talking to Strange Men, The Killing Doll, Going Wrong and Adam and Eve and Pinch Me. Many credit her and close friend P. D. James for upgrading the entire genre of whodunit, shaping it more into a whydunit. Rendell's protagonists are often socially isolated, suffer from mental illness, and/or are otherwise disadvantaged; she explores the adverse impacts of their circumstances on these characters as well as on their victims.

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Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (Hindi: अहमद सलमान रुशदी (Devanagari), احمد سلمان رشدی (Nastaʿlīq);

/sælˈmɑːn ˈrʊʃdi/; born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989.
Rushdie was appointed Commandeur dans Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Knight Bachelor for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

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Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters (born 21 July 1966) is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales in 1966.
She grew up in a family that included her father Ron, mother Mary, and a sister. Her mother was a housewife and her father an engineer who worked on oil refineries. She describes her family as "pretty idyllic, very safe and nurturing". Her father, "a fantastically creative person", encouraged her to build and invent.
Waters said, "When I picture myself as a child, I see myself constructing something, out of plasticine or papier-mâché or Meccano; I used to enjoy writing poems and stories, too." She wrote stories and poems that she describes as "dreadful gothic pastiches", but had not planned her career. Despite her obvious enjoyment of writing, she did not feel any special calling or preference for becoming a novelist in her youth.

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Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; born 13 April 1939) is an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, he now resides in Dublin.
As well as the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney has received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). He has been a member of Aosdána since its foundation and has been Saoi since 1997. He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996. Heaney's personal papers are held by the National Library of Ireland.
Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he is "the greatest poet of our age".
<poem> From Mid-Term Break
Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple, He lay in the four foot box as in a cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

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Sebastian Barker
Sebastian Smart Barker FRSL (born 16 April 1945) is a British poet. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, Corpus Christi, Oxford (MA) and at the University of East Anglia (MA).
He is the son of George Barker and Elizabeth Smart.
He was on the executive committee of P.E.N. and was the Chairman of the Poetry Society from 1988 to 1992. In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2002 he took over editorship of the London Magazine, which he resigned from in 2008 after the Arts Council England had cut the magazine's funding.
His earlier collections, which include On the Rocks (Martin, Brian & O'Keeffe 1977), and A Nuclear Epiphany (Friday Night Fish Publications, 1984) were brought together in a volume of selected poems, Guarding the Border, published by Enitharmon Press in 1992. More recent collections include The Dream of Intelligence (Littlewood Arc, 1992, a long poem based on Nietzsche’s life and works), The Hand in the Well (Enitharmon, 1996), Damnatio Memoriae: Erased from Memory (Enitharmon, 2004), and The Erotics of God (Smokestack Books, 2005).

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Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry (born 5 July 1955) is an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. He is noted for his dense literary writing style and is considered one of Ireland's finest writers.
Barry's literary career began in poetry before he began writing plays and novels. In recent years his fiction writing has surpassed his work in the theatre in terms of success, having once been considered a playwright who wrote occasional novels.
He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), the latter of which won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His 2011 novel On Canaan's Side was longlisted for the Booker.
Barry was born in Dublin. He is the son of the late Irish actress Joan O'Hara. He attended Catholic University School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus.
His academic posts have included Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984), Villanova University (2006) and Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin (1995–1996). Barry started his literary career with the novel Macker's Garden in 1982. This was followed by several books of poetry and a further novel The Engine of Owl-Light in 1987 before his career as a playwright began with his first play produced in the Abbey theater, Boss Grady's Boys in 1988.

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Sebastian Faulks
Sebastian Charles Faulks CBE (born 20 April 1953) is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known for his historical novels set in France, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong, and Charlotte Gray. He has also published novels with a contemporary setting (most recently A Week In December (2009)), and a James Bond sequel, Devil May Care. He is a team captain on BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff.
Faulks was born on 20 April 1953 in Donnington, Berkshire to Peter Faulks and Pamela (née Lawless). His father was a decorated soldier (he won the Military Cross), who later became a solicitor and judge. His brother Edward Faulks, Baron Faulks is a QC. He was educated at Elstree School, Reading and went on to Wellington College, Berkshire. He studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge where he was made an Honorary Fellow in 2007.
After graduating, Faulks lived in France for a year. When he returned to England he worked as a teacher at a private school in Camden Town, and then as a journalist. Faulks' first novel, A Trick of the Light, was published in 1984. He continued to work as a journalist, becoming the first literary editor of The Independent in 1986. He became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday in 1989; in the same year he published The Girl at the Lion D'or, the first of his historical novels set in France. In 1991 he left The Independent, and wrote for various other papers.

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Shena Mackay
Shena Mackay FRSL (born 1944), is a Scottish novelist born in Edinburgh. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for The Orchard on Fire.
After the war her family moved to Hampstead and eventually settled in Shoreham in Kent from where she attended Tonbridge Grammar School. Her writing career started with her winning a poetry competition in the Daily Mirror at the age of 16. After leaving school her first publication was a volume of two novellas, Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger/Toddler on the Run the following year.
She holds a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and is also Honorary Visiting Professor at Middlesex University. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2004 Shena explained that she is synaesthetic and "sees words as colours", her own name is yellow.
She is the mother of painter Cecily Brown with art critic David Sylvester.

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Shirley Hazzard
Shirley Hazzard (born 30 January 1931) is an Australian author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born in Australia, but holds citizenship in Great Britain and the United States. Her 1970 novel The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010 and her 2003 novel The Great Fire won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Hazzard was born in Sydney and attended Queenwood School for Girls in Mosman, but left in 1947 to travel through Southeast Asia with her parents. Her first landing was Hiroshima. Her diplomat father took her to Hong Kong, and then she was "brutally removed by destiny" to New Zealand where her father was Australian Trade Commissioner. Hazzard says of her experience of the East that "I began to feel that people could enjoy life, should enjoy life".
Hazzard's early life "was a carbon copy of Helen Driscoll's" (the heroine of The Great Fire). Helen and her brother, the dying Benedict, are described as "wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature." Poetry, she says, has always been the centre of her life.

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Shirley Hughes
Shirley Hughes, OBE (born 16 July 1927, West Kirby, Cheshire, United Kingdom) is an English author and illustrator. She has written more than fifty books which have sold more than 11.5 million copies, and illustrated over two hundred. She currently lives in London.
The daughter of Liverpool store owner Thomas Hughes, Shirley grew up in West Kirby on the Wirral. She has stated that during childhood she was inspired by artists like Arthur Rackham and W. Heath Robinson, and later the cinema and the Walker Art Gallery. She was educated at West Kirby Grammar School, and studied drawing and costume design at the Liverpool School of Art, then the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. Whilst at Oxford, she was encouraged to work in the picture book format and to make lithographic illustrations. Soon she was commissioned by Collins. After art school Hughes moved to Notting Hill, London, and married John Vulliamy, an architect and etcher, and they had three children together, including the journalist Ed Vulliamy and a daughter who is also a children's book illustrator, Clara Vulliamy.

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Shiv Kumar
Shiv Kumar 'Batalvi' (Punjabi: ਸ਼ਿਵ ਕੁਮਾਰ ਬਟਾਲਵੀ) (1936–1973) was a noted Punjabi language poet, who was most known for his romantic poetry, noted for its heightened passion, pathos, separation and lover's agony
He became the youngest recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967, given by Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters), for his epic verse play based on the ancient legend of Puran Bhagat, Loona (1965), now considered a masterpiece in modern Punjabi literature, and which also created a new genre, of modern Punjabi kissa. Today, his poetry stands in equal footing, amongst that by stalwarts of modern Punjabi poetry, like Mohan Singh and Amrita Pritam, all of whom are popular on both sides of India-Pakistan border.
Shiv Kumar was born in a Saraswat Brahmin family on 23 July 1936 (though a few documents related to him state October 7th, 1937 as his DOB), in village Bara Pind Lohtian, Shakargarh Tehsil, Sialkot District (now in Punjab province, Pakistan), to Pandit Krishan Gopal, village tehsildar in the revenue department, and Shanti Devi, a housewife.

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Simon Jenkins
Sir Simon David Jenkins (born 10 June 1943) is a British newspaper columnist and author, and since November 2008 has been chairman of the National Trust. He currently writes columns for both The Guardian and London's Evening Standard, and was previously a commentator for The Times, which he edited from 1990 to 1992. He was educated at Mill Hill School and St John's College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, politics, and economics.
A former editor of both The Times and the Evening Standard, he received a knighthood for services to journalism in the 2004 New Year honours.
He married the American actress Gayle Hunnicutt in 1978; the couple separated in 2008.
After graduating from Oxford, Jenkins worked initially at Country Life magazine, before joining the Times Educational Supplement and then editing the Sunday Times Insight pages. From 1976 to 1978 he was editor of the Evening Standard, before moving to become political editor of the Economist. He edited The Times from 1990 to 1992, but since then has primarily worked as a columnist.

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Sir Martin Gilbert
Sir Martin John Gilbert, CBE, PC (born 25 October 1936) is a British historian and honorary Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford. He is the author of over eighty books, including works on the Holocaust and Jewish history. Gilbert is a leading historian of the modern world, and is known as the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill.
Gilbert was born in London to Peter and Miriam Gilbert. Nine months after the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to Canada as part of the British efforts to safeguard children. Vivid memories of the transatlantic crossing from Liverpool to Quebec sparked his curiosity about the war in later years. After the war he attended Highgate School, and then completed two years of National Service in the Intelligence Corps before going on to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1960 with a first-class BA in modern history. One of his tutors at Oxford was A.J.P. Taylor. After his graduation, Gilbert undertook postgraduate research at St Antony's College, Oxford. In 1963, he married Helen Constance Robinson, with whom he had a daughter. He had two sons with his second wife, Susan Sacher, whom he married in 1974. Since 2005, he has been married to the Holocaust historian Esther Gilbert, née Goldberg. Gilbert describes himself as a proud practising Jew and a Zionist.

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Stanley Stewart
Stanley Stewart FRSL is an English travel writer. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award twice, in 1996 for Frontiers of Heaven (John Murray) and again in 2001 for In the Empire of Genghis Khan (Harper Collins).

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Stephen Poliakoff
Stephen Poliakoff, CBE, FRSL (born 1 December 1952) is an acclaimed British playwright, director and scriptwriter, widely judged amongst Britain's foremost television dramatists.
The second of four children, Poliakoff was sent at a young age to boarding school, which he hated. He then proceeded to Westminster School where he attracted sufficient attention for Granny, a play written and directed by him, to be reviewed in The Times newspaper. After Westminster, he went to King's College, Cambridge but never took a degree.
Poliakoff continued to write stage plays, becoming writer-in-residence for the National Theatre at the age of 24, but he became increasingly interested in the medium of television, with Stronger Than the Sun (1977 – BBC1 Play for Today), Bloody Kids (1980 – ATV), Caught on a Train (1980 – BBC2 Playhouse) starring Peggy Ashcroft, and Soft Targets (1982 – Play for Today). There were also TV adaptations of his stage plays Hitting Town (1976 – Thames Television/ITV Play for Britain) and City Sugar (1978 – Scottish Television / ITV The Sunday Drama).

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Stephen Romer
Stephen Romer is an English poet, academic and literary critic. He was born in Hertfordshire in 1957 and educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Since 1981 he has lived in France, where he is Maître de Conferences in the English department of Tours University. He has been three times Visiting Professor in French at Colgate University, New York. Stephen Romer has four published collections of poetry with the Oxford Poets imprint of Carcanet Press and is the editor of the Faber anthology Twentieth-Century French Poems. A selection of his recent poems appeared in the Carcanet Oxford Poets anthology 2001, and a book of his selected poems in French translation, Tribut, was published by Editions le temps qu’il fait in 2007. He regularly writes on French literature and modem poetry for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

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Stevie Davies
Stevie Davies is an award-winning Welsh novelist. She is currently a lecturer at the Swansea University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
She was longlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for her novel, The Element of Water, which went on to win the 2002 Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award. Her first novel, Boy Blue, had won the Fawcett Society Book Prize in 1987, and her work has also been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
She wrote a biography of the poet Henry Vaughan.

wn.com/Stevie_Davies

Susan Bassnett
Susan Bassnett (born 1945) is a translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which closed in 2009. Educated around Europe, she began her career in Italy and has lectured at universities in the United States prior to the University of Warwick where she is currently professor of comparative literature at the University of Warwick.
Clive Barker, Bassnett's long-term partner and a theatre studies academic at Warwick, died in 2005. In 2007, she was elected a Fellow at the Royal Society of Literature.
Among her more than twenty books, several have become mainstays in the field of literary criticism, especially Translation Studies (1980) and Comparative Literature (1993). A book on Ted Hughes was published in 2009. Another interesting book edited by Bassnett is Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America. Bassnett's collaboration with several intellectuals in a series of book projects have been received well. In 2006, she co-edited with Peter Bush the book The Translator as Writer. In addition to her scholarly works, Bassnett writes poetry which was published as Exchanging Lives: Poems and Translations (2002).

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Theodore Zeldin
Theodore Zeldin CBE (born 22 August 1933, British Mandate of Palestine), President of the Oxford Muse Foundation, is an English philosopher, sociologist, historian, writer and public speaker.
Zeldin was born in Palestine and went to school in Egypt and at Aylesbury Grammar School. He entered Birkbeck College, London when he was 15, graduating in 1951. He then pursued a further undergraduate degree at Christ Church, Oxford, before studying for his DPhil at St Antony's College, Oxford.
Zeldin was first known as a historian of France but is today probably most famous internationally as the author of An Intimate History of Humanity (1994), a book which probes the personal preoccupations of people in many different civilisations, both in the past and in the present; it illuminates the way emotions, curiosities, relationships and fears have evolved through the centuries, and how they might have evolved differently. Since then he has focused on how work can be made less boring and frustrating, how conversation can be less superficial, and how individuals can be more honest with one another, putting their masks aside.

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Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, he became and continues to be widely regarded for his novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional county of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.
Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels and has had a significant influence over modern English poetry, especially after The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s cited Hardy as a major figure.

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Thomas Keneally
Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright and author of non-fiction. He is best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Born in Sydney, Keneally was educated at St Patrick's College, Strathfield. Subsequently, a writing prize there has been named after him. He entered St Patrick's Seminary, Manly to train as a Catholic priest. Although he was ordained as a deacon while at the seminary he left without being ordained to the priesthood. He worked as a Sydney schoolteacher before his success as a novelist and was a lecturer at the University of New England (1968–70). He has also written screenplays, memoirs and non-fiction books.
Keneally was known as "Mick" until 1964 but began using the name Thomas when he started publishing, after advice from his publisher to use what was really his first name. He is most famous for his Schindler's Ark (1982) (later republished as Schindler's List), which won the Booker Prize and is the basis of the film Schindler's List. Many of his novels are reworkings of historical material, although modern in their psychology and style.

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Thomas Kilroy
Thomas F. Kilroy (born 23 September 1934) is an Irish playwright and novelist.
He was born in Green Street, Callan, County Kilkenny and studied at University College, Dublin. In his early career he was play editor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. In the 1980s, he sat on the board of Field Day Theatre Company, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980, and was Director of its touring company. He became Professor of English in University College, Galway, a post from which he resigned in 1989 to concentrate on writing. He now lives in County Mayo and is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and Aosdána.

wn.com/Thomas_Kilroy

Tibor Fischer
Tibor Fischer (born 15 November 1959 in Stockport, England) is a British novelist and short story writer. In 1993 he was selected by the influential literary magazine Granta as one of the 20 best young British writers.
Fischer's parents were Hungarian basketball players, who fled Hungary in 1956. The bloody 1956 revolution, and his father's background, informed Fischer's debut novel Under the Frog, a Rabelaisian yarn about a Hungarian basketball player surviving Communism. The title is derived from a Hungarian saying, that the worst possible place to be is under a frog's arse down a coal mine.
In 1992, Under the Frog won a Betty Trask Prize for literature, and was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the prestigious Booker prize.
Fischer's subsequent novels have often featured dysfunctional central characters who eventually manage to achieve some kind of redemption. They include The Thought Gang, about a delinquent and alcoholic philosophy professor who hooks up with a failed one-armed bandit in France to form a successful team of bank robbers, and The Collector Collector, about a weekend in South London, narrated by a 5000 year old Sumerian pot.

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Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash (born 12 July 1955) is a British historian, author and commentator. He is currently serving as Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. He has written about the Communist dictatorships of that region, their experience with the secret police, the Revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc states into member states of the European Union. He has examined the role of Europe in an increasingly post-Western world and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity—especially in relation to free speech.
Garton Ash was educated at Sherborne School, an independent school for boys in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset in South West England, followed by Exeter College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Modern History. For post-graduate study, he went to St Antony's College, Oxford, and then, in the still divided Berlin, the Free University in West Berlin and the Humboldt University in East Berlin.

wn.com/Timothy_Garton_Ash

Tobias Hill
Tobias Hill (born London, England, 30 March 1970) is an award-winning British poet, essayist, writer of short stories and novelist.
Tobias Hill was born in Kentish Town, in North London, to parents of German Jewish and English extraction: his maternal grandfather was the brother of Gottfried Bermann, confidant of Thomas Mann and, as owner of S. Fischer Verlag, German literature's leading publisher-in-exile during the Second World War. Hill was educated at Hampstead School and Sussex University. He lives in Cricklewood, north London.
Hill's early work appeared in magazines such as Envoi and The Frogmore Papers and published four collections,Year of the Dog (1995), Midnight in the City of Clocks (1996) (influenced by his experience of life in Japan) Zoo (1998) and Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow (2006). The last of these was described by The Guardian as "A vital, luminous collection... it is rare to come across a collection of poetry that you know with certainty you will still be reading years from now, but for me, this is such a book." Hill's collection of short stories, Skin (1997), was serialized on BBC Radio 4, was shortlisted for the 1998 John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize, and won the International PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award.

wn.com/Tobias_Hill

Tom Stacey
Tom Stacey is a British novelist, publisher, man of letters (screenwriter, foreign correspondent), traveller/kingmaker, and penologist.
Born on 11 January 1930, in the Manor House, Bletchingley, Surrey, England. He is the younger brother of Nicolas Stacey. He attended Wellesley House School (1938-43), originally at Broadstairs, Kent, England, but from September 1939 was evacuated to the Scottish Highlands.
At Eton College (1943-48) Stacey became a fourth-generation successive Stacey pupil at Eton, where he was a solo treble, the founder of Wotton’s Society in the field of philosophy, editor (with Douglas Hurd) of the weekly Eton College Chronicle, winner of the Essay Prize, and House Captain.
At Scots Guards (1948-50), in which he received his commission as Second Lieutenant, on active service in what is now known as peninsular Malaysia, spent his leave with the Temiar aborigines in the jungle, and wrote his first book (The Hostile Sun).
At Worcester College, Oxford, England (1950-51), he founded and co-organised the controversial students’ tour operation, Undergrad Tours, during the 1951 Festival of Britain year.

wn.com/Tom_Stacey

Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, CBE, FRSL (born Tomáš Straüssler; 3 July 1937) is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love and has won one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
In 1939, Stoppard left Czechoslovakia as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright. He has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965–1972) and Miriam Stoppard (1972–1992), and has two sons from each marriage, one of whom is actor Ed Stoppard.

wn.com/Tom_Stoppard

Tony Connor
Tony Connor (born John Anthony Connor, Manchester, U.K. 1930) is a British poet and playwright.
After leaving school at fourteen, Connor served in the Royal Army as a tank gunner, and later worked as a textile designer and in radio and television in Manchester in the 1960s. From 1971 until he retired in 1999 Connor was professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He lives in Middletown and London. He was a close friend of the English writer J.G. Ballard and remains close friends with Michael de Larrabeiti. One section of Connor's 2006 anthology Things Unsaid is dedicated to de Larrabeiti; de Larrabeiti's 1992 book Journal of a Sad Hermaphrodite is dedicated to Connor, and includes one of his poems.
Connor has published nine volumes of poetry. His work anthologized in British Poetry since 1945. Connor was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1974.
Tony Connor *[1] Academy of American Poets.

wn.com/Tony_Connor

Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier (born in 1962 in Washington, DC) is a bestselling historical novelist. She lives in London with her husband and son.
Chevalier was raised in Washington, D.C and graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Maryland. After receiving her B.A. in English from Oberlin College, she moved to England in 1984 where she worked several years as a reference book editor. Leaving her job in 1993, she began a year-long M.A in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Her tutors on the course were novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain.
Her career began with the book The Virgin Blue but she became known with her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, a book based on the famous painting by Vermeer.The film based on the novel received three Academy Award nominations in 2004. Burning Bright, published in March 2007, concerns two children who become neighbours of William Blake in London in 1792. Her latest novel is Remarkable Creatures, based on the life of the English 19th-century fossil collector Mary Anning.

wn.com/Tracy_Chevalier

Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He has since written further novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His most recent novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller.
Eco has also written academic texts, children's books and many essays. He is founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione at the University of San Marino, President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since November 2010) and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.
Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont in northern Italy. His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews. His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin: a gift from the heavens), which was given to his grandfather (a foundling) by a city official.

wn.com/Umberto_Eco

V. S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul, TC (born 17 August 1932) is an Indo-Trinidadian-British writer known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism. He has also written works of non-fiction, such as travel writing and essays.
Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. He has been awarded numerous other literary prizes, including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (1958), the Somerset Maugham Award (1960), the Hawthornden Prize (1964), the WH Smith Literary Award (1968), the Booker Prize (1971), the Jerusalem Prize (1983) and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature (1993).
J. M. Coetzee, writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, described Naipaul as "a master of modern English prose". In 2008, The Times ranked Naipaul seventh on their list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago, to parents of Indian descent. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former Pakistani journalist.

wn.com/V._S._Naipaul

V. S. Pritchett
Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE (16 December 1900 - 20 March 1997), was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes. His most famous nonfiction works are the memoirs A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971), and his many collections of essays on literary biography and criticism.
Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena (née Martin). His father, a London businessman in financial difficulties, had come to Ipswich to start a shop selling newspapers and stationery. The business was struggling and the couple was lodging over a toyshop at 41 St Nicholas Street where Pritchett was born on 16 December 1900. Beatrice had expected a girl, whom she planned to name after the Queen. Pritchett never liked his first name, which is why he always styled himself with his initials; even close friends would call him VSP.

wn.com/V._S._Pritchett

Ved Mehta
Ved Parkash Mehta (Born March 21, 1934) is a writer who was born in Lahore, British India (now a Pakistani city) to a Hindu family. He lost his sight at the age of four as the result of an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of the limited prospects for blind people in general, his father, a doctor, sent him over 1,300 miles away to the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay.
He was educated at Pomona College, at Balliol College, Oxford where he read Modern History, and at Harvard University, where he earned a double BA and MA. While at Pomona, one of Mehta's student readers, because very few books were available in Braille at that time, was Eugene Rose, who went on to become the Russian Orthodox hieromonk Father Seraphim Rose. Mehta referred to him in two books, one of which was Stolen Light, his second book of memoirs: “I felt very lucky to have found Gene as a reader. ... He read with such clarity that I almost had the illusion that he was explaining things.”
Mehta has lived in the Western world since 1949; he became an American citizen in 1975. His first book, an autobiography called Face to Face, which placed his early life in the context of Indian politics and history and Anglo-Indian relations, was published in 1957. Since then he has written more than 24 books, including several that deal with the subject of blindness, as well as hundreds of articles and short stories, for British, Indian and American publications. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1961 to 1994, during which time Spy magazine published a critical article about his misogynist attitude toward his assistants and writings that were frequently regarded as dull and self-indulgent. He left the magazine after, as he has claimed, he was "terminated" by editor Tina Brown.

wn.com/Ved_Mehta

Victoria Glendinning
The Hon. Victoria Glendinning, CBE (23 April 1937), is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist; she is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.
She was born in Sheffield to a Quaker family. Her father was the banker Frederic Seebohm (created a life peer as The Rt. Hon. The Baron Seebohm in April 1972), while her great-grandfather was the great economic historian, also called Frederic Seebohm. Glendinning grew up near York and after attending Millfield School in Somerset, went up to Oxford to study modern languages. In the second year of her degree, she married one of her Spanish lecturers, Professor Nigel Glendinning in 1958. They divorced in 1981. Her second husband Terence de Vere White died of Parkinson's disease in 1994 and in 1996 she married Kevin O'Sullivan. She had four sons (before she was 28), including Matthew Glendinning, with whom she coauthored the book Sons and Mothers, and the mathematician Paul Glendinning. Another son, Simon Glendinning, lectures in European Philosophy at the London School of Economics having previously taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

wn.com/Victoria_Glendinning

Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth (Punjabi: ਵਿਕਰਮ ਸੇਠ, pronounced [ˈʋɪkrəm ˈseːʈʰ]; born 20 June 1952) is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.
Vikram Seth was born on 20 June 1952 in a Punjabi family to Leila and Prem Seth in Calcutta (now Kolkata). His family lived in many cities including the Bata Shoe Company town of Batanagar, Danapur near Patna, and in London.
His younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours. His younger sister, Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, and has worked on Deepa Mehta's movies Earth and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh, Lata, Savita and two of the Chatterji siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional characters are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name — "Because he can't sue". Justice Leila Seth has said in her memoir On Balance that other characters in A Suitable Boy are composites but Haresh is a portrait of her husband Prem.)

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Vivien Noakes
Vivien Mary Noakes (16 February 1937 – 17 February 2011) was a British biographer, editor and critic. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Noakes was born Vivien Langley, the daughter of a noted aeronautical engineer, Marcus Langley. She was educated at Dunottar School, but left with A-levels, and it was not until later in life that she took her degree at Manchester College, Oxford, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she was subsequently lecturer. She also lectured at Harvard University and the Yale Center for British Art. She was an expert on Edward Lear and on the literature of World War I.
She was married to the painter Michael Noakes, in collaboration with whom she produced The Daily Life of The Queen: An Artist's Diary (2000). They had three children: Anya, Jonathan and Benedict.
She died of cancer the day after her 74th birthday, a month after suffering a stroke.

wn.com/Vivien_Noakes

Václav Havel
Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slaf ˈɦavɛl] (

listen); 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.
Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first president of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.
Havel was voted 4th in Prospect magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals. At the time of his death he was Chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. He was the founder of the VIZE 97 Foundation and the principal organizer of the Forum 2000 annual global conference.
Havel was one of the signatories of the Charter 77 manifesto, a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, and a council member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Havel received many recognitions, including the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award.

wn.com/Václav_Havel

William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (

/ˈjeɪts/ YAYTS; 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a very good friend of Indian Bengali poet Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

wn.com/William_Butler_Yeats

William St Clair
William St Clair (born 1937) FBA, FRSL, is an academic and author. His research interests lie, in large part, in the history of books and reading, ancient Greece and biography. His work has contributed significantly to his fields of study. His Reading Nation in the Romantic Period notably, has received high praise, and has been reviewed in over fifty scholarly journals; it is frequently cited by other academics. He is a founding member of [Open Book Publishers http://www.openbookpublishers.com/], based in Cambridge (UK), and an active supporter of the Open Access movement.
The book centres on the Romantic period in the English-speaking world, but ranges across the whole print era, to reach conclusions about the forces that determined how ideas were carried, through print, into wider society. It provides an investigation of information on prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives.
An account of the philhellenes - or 'lovers of Greece' - who volunteered to fight for the Greek cause during the War of Independence (1821), against the rule of the Ottoman Turks.

wn.com/William_St_Clair

William Trevor
William Trevor, KBE (born 24 May 1928) is an Irish author and playwright. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.
Trevor has resided in England since the 1950s. Over the course of his long career he has written several novels and hundreds of short stories, for which he is best known. He has won the Whitbread Prize three times and has been nominated five times for the Booker Prize, most recently for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011. Tim Adams, a staff writer for The Observer, described him as "widely believed to be the most astute observer of the human condition currently writing in fiction".
Born as William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland to a middle-class Protestant family, he moved several times to other provincial towns, including Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal and Enniscorthy as a result of his father's work as a bank official. He was educated at St. Columba's College, Dublin, and at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he received a degree in history. Trevor worked as a sculptor under the name Trevor Cox after his graduation from Trinity College, supplementing his income by teaching. He married Jane Ryan in 1952 and emigrated to England two years later, working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958, but had little critical success. In 1964, at the age of 36, Trevor won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys. The win encouraged Trevor to become a full-time writer. In 2002, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom for services to literature. He and his family moved to Devon in England, where he has resided ever since. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considers himself to be "Irish in every vein".^{[citation needed]}

wn.com/William_Trevor

Wilson Harris
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (born 24 March 1921) is a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but has since become a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging.
Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam in what was then called British Guiana. After studying at Queen's College in the capital of Guyana, Georgetown, Harris became a government surveyor, before taking up a career as lecturer and writer. The knowledge of the savannas and rain forests he gained during his time as a surveyor formed the setting for many of his books, with the Guyanese landscape dominating his fiction.
Harris came to England in 1959 and published his first novel Palace of the Peacock in 1960. This became the first of a quartet of novels, The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). He subsequently wrote the Carnival trilogy: Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990).

wn.com/Wilson_Harris

Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian writer, notable especially as a playwright and poet; he was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African in Africa and the diaspora to be so honoured.
Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years.
Soyinka has strongly criticized many Nigerian military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it".^{[citation needed]} During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–1998), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the "Nadeco Route" on motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him "in absentia". With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at Oxford, Harvard and Yale.

wn.com/Wole_Soyinka

Zachary Leader
Zachary Leader (born 1946) is a professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. He was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and later pursued graduate study both at Trinity College, Cambridge and at Harvard University. Though born in the U.S. and remaining an American citizen, Leader has lived and worked for over thirty years in the UK. His best-known works are probably The Letters of Kingsley Amis, which he edited and published in 2001, and The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006).

wn.com/Zachary_Leader

Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith (born on 25 October 1975) is a British novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on September 1, 2010.
Zadie Smith was born as Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and a British father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and emigrated to Britain in 1969. Their marriage was her father's second. Zadie has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown and the other is rapper Luc Skyz. As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist.
Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie". Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest and would provide a model for her future career.

wn.com/Zadie_Smith

Émilie Simon
Émilie Simon, Octogone, 2004
Background information
Born	(1978-07-17) 17 July 1978 (age 33)
Origin	Montpellier, France
Genres	Electronic music, trip hop, experimental music
Occupations	Singer, songwriter, composer
Years active	2003–present
Labels	Universal (2003–present) Le Plan Music (US only)
Website	emiliesimonmusic.com

Persondata
Name	Simon, Emilie
Alternative names
Short description	French singer
Date of birth	17 July 1978
Place of birth	Montpellier, France
Date of death
Place of death

Make changes yourself !

Contents

Presidents [link]

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References [link]

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Contents

Music [link]

[edit] Émilie Simon

[edit] La Marche de l'Empereur

[edit] Végétal and international success

Concerts [link]

Discography [link]

Albums [link]

Singles [link]

EP [link]

Prizes and nominations [link]

Victoires de la musique [link]

Nominations [link]

Film / Documentary [link]

References [link]

External links [link]

http://wn.com/Émilie_Simon

Related pages:

http://fr.wn.com/Émilie Simon

http://nl.wn.com/Émilie Simon

http://pt.wn.com/Émilie Simon

http://de.wn.com/Émilie Simon

http://it.wn.com/Émilie Simon

http://pl.wn.com/Émilie Simon

http://ru.wn.com/Симон, Эмили

http://es.wn.com/Émilie Simon

Fellow	Year of election
Dannie Abse	1983
Chinua Achebe	1983
Peter Ackroyd CBE	1984
Gilbert Adair	2011
Richard Adams	1975
Donald Adamson JP FSA FRHistS	1983
Fleur Adcock OBE	1984
Diran Adebayo	2006
John Agard	2007
Brian Aldiss OBE	1990
Keith Alldritt	1978
Fergus Allen CB	2000
*David Altaras	1996
Martin Amis	1983
Mark Amory	1996
Carole Angier	2002
The Marquess of Anglesey DL FSA FRHistS	1969
John Arden	2000
Simon Armitage	2004
Karen Armstrong	2005
Bruce Arnold OBE	1994
Geoffrey Ashe	1963
Michael Asher	1996
Rosemary Ashton OBE FBA	1999
Diana Athill OBE	2001
Kate Atkinson	2010
Margaret Atwood	2010
Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE	1991
Paul Bailey	1999
Dame Beryl Bainbridge DBE	1978
Michael Baldwin	1984
Iain Banks	2009
John Banville	2007
Richard Barber	1971
Juliet Barker	2001
Pat Barker CBE	1995
Sebastian Barker	1997
Frank Barlow CBE FBA FRHistS	1971
Correlli Barnett CBE	1964
Sebastian Barry	2009
Jacques Barzun	1994
Susan Bassnett	2007
Jonathan Bate CBE FBA	2004
Nina Bawden CBE	1970
Martin Bax	2002
John Bayley CBE FBA	1967
Sir Christopher Alan Bayly FBA FRHistS	2005
Dame Gillian Beer DBE FBA	2006
Antony Beevor	1999
Rosalind Belben	1999
Anne Olivier Bell	1984
Bernard Bergonzi	1984
Elizabeth Berridge	1997
Christopher Bigsby	2000
*Robert Binyon	2000
Dea Birkett	2000
Julia Blackburn	2002
Malorie Blackman	2009
Ronald Blythe, Benson Medallist	1970
James T. Boulton FBA	1969
William Boyd CBE	1982
Melvyn Bragg (The Lord Bragg FRTS)	1971
Piers Brendon	2010
Raymond Briggs	1993
Robin Briggs	1999
Michael Brock CBE FRHistS	1983
Hugh Brogan	1987
Anita Brookner CBE	1982
Alan Brownjohn	1999
James Buchan	2001
Brian Burland	1999
John Burnside	1999
Marilyn Butler FBA	1989
A. S. Byatt (Dame Antonia Duffy DBE)	1983
David Cairns	2001
Carmen Callil	2010
Sir David Cannadine FBA FRHistS	1999
John Carey FBA	1982
Peter Carey	1989
Sir Raymond Carr FBA FRHistS	1977
Miranda Carter	2011
Justin Cartwright	2002
David Caute	1998
Glen Cavaliero	1986
Hugh Cecil	1997
Aidan Chambers	2009
Amit Chaudhuri	2009
Tracy Chevalier	2008
Anne Chisholm	1989
Rupert Christiansen	1997
Kate Clanchy	2009
Gillian Clarke	2000
John Clay^{[disambiguation needed ]}	1998
Morton N. Cohen	1996
Isabel Colegate	1981
Linda Colley CBE FBA FRHistS	2004
Tony Connor	1972
Robert Conquest CMG OBE	1972
P. J. Conrad	1974
Peter Conradi	2010
David Constantine	2007
Wendy Cope	1992
John Cornwell	1985
Jim Crace	1999
Kevin Crossley-Holland	1998
Anthony Curtis	2010
Tony Curtis	2000
David Dabydeen	2000
William Dalrymple	1995
Richard Davenport-Hines	2003
Lionel Davidson	1997
Andrew Davies	1996
Paul Davies	1999
Stevie Davies	1998
Dick Davis	1981
Richard Dawkins FRS	1997
Louis de Bernières	2006
Alain de Botton	2011
Shelagh Delaney	1985
Anita Desai, Benson Medallist	1978
Imtiaz Dharker	2010
Peter Dickinson	1999
David Dilks FRHistS	1986
Jenny Diski	1999
Maura Dooley	2006
Roddy Doyle	2003
Dame Margaret Drabble DBE	1973
Carol Ann Duffy CBE	1999
Maureen Duffy	1985
Ian Duhig	2006
Katherine Duncan-Jones	1991
Helen Dunmore	1997
Douglas Dunn OBE	1981
Jane Dunn	1999
Nell Dunn	2004
Geoff Dyer	2005
*Umberto Eco	1992
David Edgar	1985
Max Egremont (The Lord Egremont DL FSA)	2001
Anne Enright	2008
Richard J. Evans FBA FRHistS	1999
Bernardine Evaristo	2004
Sir Richard Eyre CBE	2011
Ruth Fainlight	2007
Moris Farhi MBE	2001
Sebastian Faulks CBE	1994
Elaine Feinstein	1981
James Fenton	1983
Adam Fergusson MEP	2010
Maggie Fergusson	2007
The Hon William Fiennes	2009
Orlando Figes	2003
Anne Fine OBE	2003
Tibor Fischer	2003
Roy Fisher	2005
Margaret Forster	1974
Richard Fortey	2010
Roy Foster FBA FRHistS	1992
Adam Foulds	2010
Lady Antonia Fraser DBE	2003
Robert Fraser	2007
Michael Frayn CLit	1969
Brian Friel	1998
Athol Fugard	1986
John Fuller	1980
P. N. Furbank	1992
Paul Fussell	1977
Mavis Gallant CC	1989
Jane Gardam OBE	2005
*Anthony Gardner	2004
Philip Gardner	1986
Timothy Garton Ash CMG	2005
Bamber Gascoigne	1976
Norman Gash CBE FBA FRHistS	1973
*The Lord Gavron CBE	1996
Maggie Gee, Vice-President	1994
Amitav Ghosh	2009
Sir Martin Gilbert CBE	1977
Sir David Gilmour Bt	1990
Lesley Glaister	1994
The Hon Victoria Glendinning CBE, Vice-President	1982
Julian Gloag	1970
*Martyn Goff CBE	2002
Magdalen Goffin	1980
Nadine Gordimer, Benson Medallist	1975
Lyndall Gordon	2002
Warwick Gould	1997
Grey Gowrie (The Earl of Gowrie PC)	2003
*Günter Grass	1993
A. C. Grayling	2006
Peter Green	1956
Lavinia Greenlaw	2004
John Gribbin	1999
Romesh Gunesekera	2004
Abdulrazak Gurnah	2006
Tessa Hadley	2009
John Haffenden FBA	1986
The Rt Hon William Hague MP	2009
John Halperin	1985
Georgina Hammick	2001
Christopher Hampton CBE	1976
Barbara Hardy FBA	1997
Sir David Hare	1985
Claire Harman	2006
Richard Harries (The Rt Rev The Lord Harries of Pentregarth)	1996
Robert Harris	1996
Wilson Harris	2007
Tony Harrison	1984
David Harsent	1999
Ronald Harwood CBE, Vice-President	1974
Sir Max Hastings	1996
Lady Selina Hastings	1994
Roy Hattersley (The Lord Hattersley PC)	2003
*Václav Havel	1993
Cameron Hazlehurst	1973
Shirley Hazzard	1998
Tim Heald	2000
Denis Healey (The Lord Healey CH MBE PC)	1993
*Seamus Heaney CLit	1991
*Drue Heinz Hon DBE	2002
Philip Hensher	1998
Dominic Hibberd	2002
Geoffrey Hill	1972
Reginald Hill	1999
Rosemary Hill	2009
Tobias Hill	2011
Bevis Hillier	1997
Tim Hilton	1993
Barry Hines	1977
Russell Hoban	1988
Eric Hobsbawm CH FBA	2006
Mary Hocking	1977
Eva Hoffman	2007
Richard Hoggart	2003
Ursula Holden	2010
Alan Hollinghurst	1995
Richard Holmes OBE FBA	1975
Sir Michael Holroyd CBE CLit FRHistS, President Emeritus	1968
Park Honan	1998
Hugh Honour FBA	1972
Christopher Hope	1990
Nick Hornby	1996
Sir Alistair Horne CBE	1968
Elizabeth Jane Howard CBE	1991
Philip Howard^{[disambiguation needed ]}	1987
Kathryn Hughes FRHistS	2006
Shirley Hughes OBE	2000
Lucy Hughes-Hallett	2009
Roland Huntford	2001
Aamer Hussein	2004
Angela Huth	1978
Samuel Hynes	1978
Robert Irwin	2001
Kazuo Ishiguro OBE	1989
Ian Jack	2009
Dan Jacobson	2007
Clive James	2010
P. D. James (The Baroness James of Holland Park OBE JP), Vice-President	1987
Kathleen Jamie	2009
Deborah Jay	2005
Alan Jenkins	2002
Elizabeth Jenkins OBE	1970
Sir Simon Jenkins	2003
Liz Jensen	2005
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala CBE	1974
*Paula Johnson	2008
Jennifer Johnston	2009
Steve Jones^[3]	2011
Jenny Joseph	1999
Gabriel Josipovici FBA	1997
Alan Judd	1990
Mimi Kalvati	2009
P. J. Kavanagh	1986
Jackie Kay	2002
Jonathan Keates	1992
H. R. F. Keating	1990
Sir John Keegan OBE FRHistS	1986
Laurence Kelly	2003
Linda Kelly	2003
Thomas Keneally	1973
A. L. Kennedy	1999
*HRH The Duke of Kent KG	1978
Mimi Khalvati	2009
Thomas Kilroy	1972
Matthew Kneale	2003
Shiv K. Kumar	1978
Hanif Kureishi CBE	2008
David Kynaston	2010
John Lanchester	2002
Robin Lane Fox	1974
Lee Langley	1996
James Lasdun	2009
Bryony Lavery	2002
Zachary Leader	2007
Hermione Lee CBE FBA	1992
Molly Lefebure	2010
Brendan Lehane	1999
Mike Leigh OBE	2008
Laurence Lerner	1984
*Doris Lessing CH CLit	2001
Andrea Levy	2005
Paul Levy	1980
Gwyneth Lewis	1999
Jeremy Lewis	1992
R. P. Lister	1970
Penelope Lively CBE	1985
Samuel Lock	2001
David Lodge CBE	1976
Michael Longley	1988
Roger Lonsdale FBA	1989
Edward Lucie-Smith	1964
Andrew Lycett	2009
Geraldine McCaughrean	2010
Fiona MacCarthy	1997
Ian McDonald AA	1970
Ian McEwan CBE	1983
Robert Macfarlane	2010
Roger McGough CBE	2004
Patrick McGrath	2002
Denis Mack Smith CBE FBA	1977
Shena Mackay	1999
Rory MacLean	2007
Margaret MacMillan	2003
Candia McWilliam	1994
Brenda Maddox	1999
Noel Malcolm FBA	1997
David Malouf	2008
Alberto Manguel	2010
Philip Mansel	2010
Hilary Mantel CBE	1990
Patrick Marber	2002
Patrick Marnham	1988
Philip Marsden	1996
Rosalind Marshall	1974
Adam Mars-Jones	2007
Allan Massie	1982
Douglas Matthews FCLIP, Benson Medallist	1998
Glyn Maxwell	1999
Derwent May	1996
Geraldine McCaughrean	2010
Ernest Mehew	1999
Ved Mehta	2009
Edward Mendelson	2003
Jeffrey Meyers	1983
Mary Midgley	2007
Karl Miller	1992
Michael Millgate	1983
Pankaj Mishra	2008
Rohinton Mistry	2009
Julian Mitchell	1985
Deborah Moggach	1999
Caroline Moorehead OBE	1993
Edwin Morgan OBE	2004
Elaine Morgan	2009
Michael Morpurgo OBE	2004
Jan Morris CBE	1961
Blake Morrison	1988
Nicholas Mosley (The Lord Ravensdale MC)	1980
Sir Andrew Motion	1984
Sir Ferdinand Mount Bt	1991
Paul Muldoon	1981
Alice Munro	2002
Richard Murphy	1968
V. S. Naipaul (Sir Vidia Naipaul CLit)	1962
Venetia Newall FSA	1980
Charles Nicholl	2005
Grace Nichols	2007
Peter Nichols	1983
William Nicholson	1999
Adam Nicolson (The Lord Carnock FSA)	2005
Vivien Noakes	1996
The Hon Gerard Noel	1999
Leslie Norris	1974
John Julius Norwich (The Viscount Norwich CVO FSA)	1970
Robert Nye	1977
Sean O'Brien	2007
Bernard O'Donoghue	1999
Julia O'Faolain	1998
Andrew O'Hagan	2009
Redmond O'Hanlon	1993
Ben Okri OBE	1997
*Sir Christopher Ondaatje CBE	2003
Charles Osborne^{[disambiguation needed ]}	1996
Ewald Osers	1984
Ruth Padel	1998
Alan Palmer	1980
Peter Parker	1997
Don Paterson	2004
Jill Paton Walsh	1996
Brian Patten	2003
Catherine Peters	1992
Humphrey Phelps	1977
Caryl Phillips	2000
Mike Phillips	2000
David Plante	2002
Piers Plowright	1998
Stephen Poliakoff CBE	1985
David Pownall	1976
(Baron) David Profumo	1995
David Pryce-Jones	1980
Philip Pullman CBE	2001
Isabel Quigly	1989
Craig Raine	1984
Nicholas Rankin	2009
Frederic Raphael	1964
Piers Paul Read	1972
Anne Redmon	1980
Joan Rees	1982
Christopher Reid	1999
Ruth Rendell (The Baroness Rendell of Babergh CBE)	1988
Christopher Ricks FBA	1970
The Hon Professor Jane Ridley	2007
The Hon Dr Matt Ridley DL FMedSci	1999
William Rivière	2000
Graham Robb	1999
Andrew Roberts	2001
Michèle Roberts	1999
Robin Robertson	2009
Jane Rogers	1994
Stephen Romer	2011
Kenneth Rose CBE	1976
Jacob Ross	2006
J. K. Rowling OBE	2002
Anthony Rudolf	2005
Carol Rumens	1984
Sir Salman Rushdie	1983
Lawrence Sail	1998
Fiona Sampson	2010
The Hon Giles St Aubyn LVO	1964
William St Clair FBA	1973
*John Saumarez Smith, Benson Medallist	1996
J. J. Scarisbrick FRHistS	1969
Ann Schlee	1997
Michael Schmidt	1993
*Patricia Schute	1991
The Rev Professor M.A. Screech FBA	1989
Roger Scruton FBA	2003
Peter Scupham	1990
Simon Sebag-Montefiore	2003
Elisa Segrave	2001
Richard Sennett	1999
Vikram Seth CBE	1994
Miranda Seymour	1996
Sir Peter Shaffer CBE	1978
Nicholas Shakespeare	1999
Kamila Shamsie	2011
Jo Shapcott	1999
Norman Sherry	1985
Elaine Showalter	2011
Posy Simmonds MBE	2004
Helen Simpson	1996
Andrew Sinclair	1972
Clive Sinclair	1983
Iain Sinclair	2009
Robert Skidelsky (The Lord Skidelsky of Tilton FBA FRHistS)	1978
Ali Smith	2007
Godfrey Smith	1995
*Julia Abel Smith DL	2009
Lacey Baldwin Smith FRHistS	1972
Zadie Smith	2002
Mary Soames (The Baroness Soames LG DBE PC)	2000
Ahdaf Soueif	2002
*Wole Soyinka, Benson Medallist	1983
Frances Spalding CBE	1984
Francis Spufford	2007
Hilary Spurling CBE	2005
John Spurling	2010
Tom Stacey	1977
Jon Stallworthy FBA	1971
Martin Stannard	1999
C. K. Stead ONZ CBE	1995
George Steiner FBA	1962
Rory Stewart OBE MP	2009
Stanley Stewart	2001
Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE CLit	1972
Sir Roy Strong FSA	1999
Kate Summerscale	2010
Virginia Surtees	1978
John Sutherland	1990
Graham Swift	1984
George Szirtes	1982
D. J. Taylor	1997
Emma Tennant (The Hon Mrs Timothy Owens)	1982
Hugh Thomas (The Lord Thomas of Swynnerton FRHistS)	1997
Ian Thomson	2003
Colin Thubron CBE, President	1969
Ann Thwaite	1987
Anthony Thwaite OBE	1978
Gillian Tindall	1983
Colm Tóibín	2007
A.Trevor Tolley	1998
(Count) Nikolai Tolstoy	1979
Claire Tomalin, Vice-President	1976
Sue Townsend	1993
Jeremy Treglown	1989
Rose Tremain CBE	1983
Raleigh Trevelyan	1973
William Trevor CLit Hon KBE	1976
Lynne Truss	2004
Eva Tucker	2010
Jenny Uglow CBE	1998
Barry Unsworth	1974
Edward Upward, Benson Medallist	2005
James Walvin OBE	2006
Marina Warner CBE FBA	1984
Val Warner	1998
Sarah Waters	2009
Daniel Weissbort	2008
Fay Weldon CBE	1986
Robert Wells	1994
Timberlake Wertenbaker	1999
Sir Arnold Wesker	1985
Sara Wheeler	1999
Hugh Whitemore	1998
Helen Wilcox	1999
Hugo Williams	1988
Nigel Williams	1994
The Most Rev Dr Rowan Williams PC FBA	2003
A. N. Wilson	1982
Frances Wilson	2008
Dame Jacqueline Wilson DBE	2005
Lewis Wolpert CBE FRS	1999
Charles Wood	1985
Michael Wood	1992
Gerard Woodward	2005
Pamela Woof	1999
Andrew Wright	1971
Kit Wright	1997
Ann Wroe FRHistS	2007
Francis Wyndham	1999
Adam Zamoyski	2006
Theodore Zeldin OBE FBA FRHistS	1999
Philip Ziegler CVO	1972