Sir Henry Howarth Bashford (1880 – 1961) was a distinguished English physician, becoming doctor to George VI. He is now remembered as a writer, in particular of the satirical Augustus Carp, Esq., By H…
Neal Stephenson is the author of Reamde, Anathem, and the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), as well as Cryptonomicon, The Diamon…
Edith Mary Pargeter, OBE, BEM was a prolific author of works in many categories, especially history and historical fiction, and was also honoured for her translation…
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. D…
The detective stories of well-known British writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers mostly feature the amateur investigator Lord Peter Wimsey; she also translated the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional d…
Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and she has been a critically acclaimed internatio…
Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sh…
Carr was born in Thirsk Junction, Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire, into a Wesleyan Methodist family. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a st…
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels featuring Sco…
Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of (Robert) Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978). His first crime novel and musical composition were both accepted for publication while he was still an undergraduate at Oxfor…
Dame Ngaio Marsh, born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. There is some uncertainty over her birth date as her father neglected to register her birth until 1900, b…
Maria Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish gentry-woman, born in Oxfordshire and later resettling in County Longford. She eventually took over the management of her father's estate in Ireland and dedicated he…
Dora Jessie Saint MBE née Shafe (born 17 April 1913), best known by the pen name Miss Read, was an English novelist, by profession a schoolmistress. Her pseudonym was derived from her mother's maiden …
Cyril Hare was the pseudonymn of Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark who was the third son of Henry Herbert Gordon Clark of Mickleham Hall, a merchant in the wine and spirit trade in the family firm of Matt…
Dubravka Ugrešić was a Yugoslav, Croatian and Dutch writer. She left Croatia in 1993 and was based in Amsterdam since 1996. She described herself as "post-Yugoslav, transnational, or, even more precis…
Rory Clements has had a long and successful newspaper career, including being features editor and associate editor of Today, editor of the Daily Mail's Good Health Pages, and editor of the health sect…
Christopher Shevlin is, essentially, an older, bearded and slightly shorter version of Jonathon Fairfax. He grew up in Yorkshire and spent his whole adult life in London, before going to Berlin to wri…
Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. His short stories have …
The author, writing under the pseudonym of The Secret Barrister, is a junior barrister practising criminal law before the courts of England and Wales. The Secret Barrister is also a blogger who in 201…