Shafak, Elif
Elif Shafak is a British-Turkish writer, author of seventeen books, eleven of which are novels, including The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, Three Daughters of Eve and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize; and chosen Blackwell’s Book of the […]
Mary Beard
Mary Beard is one of Britain’s best-known Classicists – a distinguished Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Newnham College, where she has taught for the last 30 years. She has written numerous books on the Ancient World, including the 2008 Wolfson Prize-winner, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town which […]
Glendinning, Victoria
Nichols, Grace
Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1950 and grew up in a small country village on the Guyanese coast. She moved to the city with her family when she was eight, an experience central to her first novel, Whole of a Morning Sky (1986), set in 1960s Guyana in the middle of the country’s struggle […]
Tomalin, Claire
Gee, Maggie
Kay, Jackie
Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University where she read English. The experience of being adopted by and […]
Appignanesi, Lisa
Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist and cultural commentator. She is the Chair of the Man Booker International Prize 2018. She was for many years Chair of the Freud Museum London and President of English PEN. A former Deputy Director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, she has judged many literary prizes. She […]
Armitage, Simon
Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden and lives in West Yorkshire. He is a graduate of Portsmouth University, where he studied Geography. As a post-graduate student at Manchester University, his MA thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders. Until 1994 he worked as a Probation Officer in […]
Duffy, Maureen
Shamsie, Kamila
Kamila Shamsie is the author of six novels: In the City by the Sea (shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Salt and Saffron; Kartography (also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Broken Verses; Burnt Shadows (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction) and A God in Every Stone, which was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction […]
Morrison, Blake
Born in Yorkshire, Blake Morrison is a poet, novelist and librettist, as well as the author of two bestselling memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father and Things My Mother Never Told Me. After working for the Times Literary Supplement, he went on to become literary editor of both The Observer and the […]