Born in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon and left school at sixteen. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled jobs: trainee welder, assistant librarian, trainee reporter, archaeological worker, fruit …
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Colu…
Ian McEwan studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970 and later received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.
Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of…
Hulme, Keri (1947–2021), novelist, short story writer and poet, gained international recognition with her award-winning The Bone People. Within New Zealand she has held writing fellowships at several …
Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. …
Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first nov…
DR PHILIPPA GREGORY studied history at the University of Sussex and was awarded a PhD by the University of Edinburgh where she is a Regent and was made Alumna of the Year in 2009. She holds an honorar…
Sir Michael Edward Palin, KCMG, CBE, FRGS is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel doc…
Niall Williams studied English and French Literature at University College Dublin and graduated with a MA in Modern American Literature. He moved to New York in 1980 where he married Christine Breen. …
Salley Vickers was born in Liverpool, the home of her mother, and grew up as the child of parents in the British Communist Party. She won a state scholarship to St Paul’s Girl’s School and went on to …
Sheila Hancock is one of Britain's most highly regarded and popular actors, and received an OBE for services to drama in 1974 and a CBE in 2011. Since the 1950s she has enjoyed a career across Film, T…
New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist Deanna Raybourn is a 6th-generation native Texan. She graduated with a double major in English and history from the University of Texas at San Antonio…
Kate Ellis was born and brought up in Liverpool and she studied drama in Manchester. She worked in teaching, marketing and accountancy before first enjoying writing success as a winner of the North We…
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, and naturalist. They are the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk and Vesper Flights along with Shaler’s Fish, a history of falconry, and two other books of poetr…
Clare Chambers was born on 1966 in in Croydon, Surrey, England, UK, daughter of English teachers. She attended a school in Croydon. At 16, she met Peter, her future husband, a teacher 14 years old tha…
Sarah Moss is the award-winning author of six novels: Cold Earth, Night Waking, selected for the Fiction Uncovered Award in 2011, Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children and The Tidal Zone, all short…
Sarah Winman (born 1964) is a British actress and author. In 2011 her debut novel When God Was a Rabbit became an international bestseller and won Winman several awards including New Writer of the Yea…
Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her writing has been published in The New …
Olga Sofia Ravn is a Danish poet and novelist. Initially she published poetry which was acclaimed by the critics, as was her first novel Celestine. She is also a translator and has worked as a literar…
James Rebanks runs a family-owned farm in the Lake District in northern England. A graduate of Oxford University, James works as an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism.
Lisa Ridzén (b.1988) is a doctoral student in sociology, researching masculinity norms in the rural communities of the Swedish far north, where she herself was raised and now lives in a small village …
