Simon Armitage is the UK Poet Laureate and was Oxford Professor of Poetry (2015-2019). He was appointed Professor of Poetry at Leeds University in 2017. His numerous accolades include an Ivor Novello Award for songwriting in the BAFTA-winning film Feltham Sings and the 2018 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Armitage has published 12 collections of poetry, including Paper Aeroplane - Selected Poems, and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He also writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North, Walking Home and Walking Away. His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare's Globe, London, in 2014. In 2010 Simon Armitage was made CBE for services to poetry.
Artemis Cooper's books include Cairo in the War, 1939-1945; Writing at the Kitchen Table, the Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David; Patrick Leigh Fermor, an Adventure; Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence<...
Clare Clark is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels. Her first, The Great Stink, was longlisted for the Orange (now Women’s) Prize and shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger. Her third novel, Savage Lands, was also longliste...
Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of I Let You Go, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and the fastest-selling title by a new crime writer in 2015. It also won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2016.
Bot...
Greg is a ‘writer and encourager of writers’. He has worked for many years as editor, dramaturge and script consultant in theatre, film and novels. As well as running writing workshops for Guardian Masterclasses, Southbank Centre and Chichester Fe...
Nikesh Shukla is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of Coconut Unlimited (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award), Meatspace and the critically acclaimed The One Who Wrote Destiny. Nikesh is the editor of the b...
Paterson Joseph is a beloved British actor and writer. Recently seen on Vigil and Noughts and Crosses, he has also starred in Peep Show and Law & Order UK and he plays Arthur Slugworth in the forthcoming Wonka Literature
Peter Kemp is the Sunday Times’s Chief Fiction Reviewer and has been writing for the paper for forty years. He was its Fiction Editor from 1994 to 2010 and was a theatre reviewer for the Independent from its launch in 1987 to 1991. ...
One of the UK’s most accomplished and respected novelists, Val McDermid has sold over 18.5 million books to date across the globe and is translated into more than 40 languages. She is perhaps best-known for her Wire in the Blood series, fea...
Ben Macintyre is the multimillion-copy bestselling author of books including Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends and SAS. His latest book, The Spy and The Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War,Literature
British writer Bernardine Evaristo was the joint winner of the Booker Prize 2019 with her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other, making her the first black woman to win the prize in its 51-year history. It was also a Barack Obama ‘Top 19 Book of ...
Charles Cumming was born in Scotland in 1971. He was educated at Eton and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1994 with First Class Honours in English Literature. In 1995, he was approached by the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). ...
Chris Brookmyre worked as a sub-editor for Screen International and The Scotsman before becoming a full time novelist. He is the author of twenty-seven crime and science fiction novels, including Black Widow, which won the 2016 McIlvanney P...
Denise Mina is the author of the Garnethill trilogy, the Paddy Meehan series and the Alex Morrow series. She has won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award twice and was inducted into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame i...
Ed Balls is a broadcaster, writer and economist. He is Professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London and a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, co-Chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and Vice-President and former Cha...
Ian Rankin is the multi-million copy worldwide bestseller of over thirty novels and creator of John Rebus. His books have been translated into thirty-six languages and have been adapted for radio, stage and screen.
Rankin is the recipient o...
A past Fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Jamie Susskind studied history and politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating first in his year before turning to law.
Jamie's award-winning bestseller Fu...
Jane Smiley is the author of many novels including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Golden Age, the concluding volume of 'The Last Hundred Years' trilogy. She is also the author of five works...
John McCarthy has worked as a journalist since leaving university. His life was infamously changed when, on his first foreign assignment, he was abducted in Beirut by Islamic Fundamentalists and held hostage for 1,943 days.
Subsequent...
JoJo Moyes is one of the most successful novelist of the 21st century – her bestselling novels have been translated into 46 languages and sold over 38 million copies worldwide. Her bestselling books include The Giver o...
A widely published journalist, Lionel Shriver is the author of fourteen novels, including the New York Times bestsellers So Much for That (a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize) and The Post-Birthd...
Louis de Bernières is the bestselling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book in 1995. His most recent books are The Dust That Falls From Dreams, Birds Without Wings and A Partisa...
Writer Lynne Truss is best known for her bestselling books, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – which has sold over three million copies worldwide – and Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World T...
Maggie O'Farrell is the award-winning author of the Sunday Times no. 1 bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, and eight novels: After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Aw...
Marisa Haetzman worked as a consultant anaesthetist, her career taking her to London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow before stepping down to study for a Masters degree in the History of Medicine. Her dissertation research into the early use of ch...
Mark Billingham is one of the UK’s most acclaimed and popular crime writers. His series of novels featuring DI Tom Thorne has twice won him the Crime Novel of the Year Award.
His debut novel Sleepyhead was published in 2001 and was ...
Mary Beard is one of Britain's best-known Classicists - Professor at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College. She has written numerous books including the Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, the best-s...
Mike Gayle was born and raised in Birmingham. After graduating from Salford University with a degree in Sociology, he moved to London to pursue a career in journalism and worked as a features editor and agony uncle. He has writted for a variety of...
In 2015 Okechukwu Nzelu was the recipient of a Northern Writers' Award from New Writing North. His debut novel, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney (Dialogue Books), won a Betty Trask Award; it was also shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott P...
Pam Ayres has been a writer, broadcaster, and entertainer for over 40 years, and is one of the few authors who has had books in the Sunday Times bestseller charts in almost every decade since the 1970s.
Pam has appeared three times for HM ...
Pamela Paul is the editor of the Book Review and oversees all books coverage at The New York Times where she is also the host of the weekly Book Review podcast. She is the author of seven books, includi...
Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962 where his father was governor of HM Prison Camp Hill. The family shortly afterwards moved to Wandsworth Prison then on to Winchester. There Patrick was a Quirister at the cathedral choir school an...
Paul Mendez was born and raised in the West Midlands. He now lives in London and is studying for an MA in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a performing member of two theatre companies, and worked as a voice ac...
Author, historian and publisher Penny Legg is a popular public speaker with a wide repertoire of entertaining subjects, ranging from the history of Southampton and British folklore to military history and the Second World War home front.
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Prue Leith has lived a lively life in all respects. She has had successful careers in food; with cookbooks, journalism, the restaurant and catering world, with her chef schools as a TV presenter and Great British Bake Off judge. But she’s also had...
Rachel Joyce is the author of the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, The Music Shop and a collection of interlinked short stories, A Snow Gar...
Richard Osman is a British television producer and presenter on shows including Pointless and Richard Osman’s House of Games. The Thursday Murder Club is his first and, so far, best novel. It is the fastest-selling adult debut...
Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi immigrant parents in Wolverhampton in 1976. He entered the education system unable to speak English but, after attending Wolverhampton Grammar School, graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge with a first-cla...
One of Britain’s foremost authors, Sebastian Faulks has written novels ranging from the classic Human Traces (2005) and Birdsong (1993) - consistently vote...
Simon Winchester grew up in South-West England and studied geology at Oxford. He is the bestselling author of The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, <...
Victoria Hislop is the bestselling and award-winning author of six books, including The Island, The Return, The Thread, The Sunrise, Cartes Postales from Greece, and a collection of short stories, The Last Dance and Other Stories. He...
