Authors Similar like J.B. Priestley

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W

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Stuart Maconie

Stuart Maconie is a TV and radio presenter, journalist, columnist and author.

He is the UK’s best-selling travel writer of non-TV tie-in books and his Pies and Prejudice was one of 2008’s top selling paperbacks. His work has been compared with Bill Bryson, Alan Bennett and John Peel and described by The Times as a 'National Treasure'.

He co-hosts the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 2 every Monday – Thursday evening, as well as The Freak Zone on 6Music on Sunday afternoons, and has written and presented dozens of other shows on BBC Radio. His TV work includes presenting the BBC's On Trial shows, Pop on Trial and Style on Trial, as well as Stuart Maconie’s TV Towns, a popular gazeteer of major British cities and their roles in modern cu

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G.T. Karber

G.T. Karber grew up in a small town in Arkansas, the son of a judge and a civil rights attorney. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Arkansas with a degree in mathematics and English literature. Then, he moved to Los Angeles, where he received a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

As the General Secretary of the Hollywood Mystery Society, a theater ensemble and cinematic social club, he has overseen the staging of more than 30 immersive whodunits in the LA area. His first feature film, Killer Party, a horror-comedy-musical-whodunit he co-wrote and directed, is currently in post-production with plans to premiere in festivals in 2023.

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Carol Ann Duffy

Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold this position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

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Sita Brahmachari

Sita was born in Derby in 1966, to an Indian doctor from Kolkata and an English nurse from the Lake District. She has a BA in English Literature and an MA in Arts Education. Her many projects and writing commissions have been produced in theatres, universities, schools and community groups throughout Britain and America. ARTICHOKE HEARTS is her first novel for young people. Sita lives and works in North London with her husband, three children and a temperamental cat.

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Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute Norway was a popular British novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer.

He used Nevil Shute as his pen name, and his full name in his engineering career, in order to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels.

He lived in Australia for the ten years before his death.

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Elizabeth Laird

Laird was born in New Zealand in 1943, the fourth of five children. Her father was a ship's surgeon; both he and Laird's mother were Scottish. In 1945, Laird and her family returned to Britain and she grew up in South London, where she was educated at Croydon High School.
When she was eighteen, Laird started teaching at a school in Malaysia. She decided to continue her adventurous life, even though she was bitten by a poisonous snake and went down with typhoid.

After attending the university in Bristol, Laird began teaching English in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She and a friend would hire mules and go into remote areas in the holidays.

After a while at Edinburgh University, Laird worked in India for a summer. During travel, she met her future hu

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A.M. Dassu

A. M. Dassu is a multi award-winning writer of both non-fiction and fiction including the internationally acclaimed novel Boy, Everywhere, one of The Guardian’s, Bookriot’s, Kirkus’s, American Library Association's Booklist's, CLPE's and BookTrust’s Best Children’s Book of the Year. It has coveted starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly and is also an American Library Association's Notable Book. Boy, Everywhere also featured as one of The Guardian’s Children’s Best New Novels on publication in October 2020, is on Amnesty’s Books That Inspire Activism list and has been listed for 25 awards including the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and Carnegie Medal, and is the 2021 winner of The Little Rebels Award for Radical Fic

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William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W

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Terry Pratchett

Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for the Discworld series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983–2015, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens (1990), which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman.
Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971. The first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983, after which Pratchett wrote an average of two books a year. The final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, was published in August 2015, five months after his death.
With more than 100 million books sold worldwide in 43 languages, Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Emp

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Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.

Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fic

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David Lodge

David John Lodge was an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge also wrote television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T.S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a colle

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Robert Cormier

Robert Edmund Cormier (January 17, 1925–November 2, 2000) was an American author, columnist and reporter, known for his deeply pessimistic, downbeat literature. His most popular works include I Am the Cheese, After the First Death, We All Fall Down and The Chocolate War, all of which have won awards. The Chocolate War was challenged in multiple libraries. His books often are concerned with themes such as abuse, mental illness, violence, revenge, betrayal and conspiracy. In most of his novels, the protagonists do not win.

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Ethel Lina White

Ethel Lina White was a British crime writer, best known for her novel The Wheel Spins (1936), on which the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes (1938), was based, and Some Must Watch (1933), on which the film The Spiral Staircase (1946) was based.

Born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876, White started writing as a child, contributing essays and poems to children's papers. Later she began to write short stories, but it was some years before she wrote books.

She left employment in a government job working for the Ministry of Pensions in order to pursue writing. Her writing was to make her one of the best known crime writers in Britain and the USA during the 1930s and '40s.

Her first three works, published between 1927 and 1930, w

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Willy Russell

William Russell is a British dramatist, lyricist, and composer. His best-known works are Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, and Blood Brothers.

Willy Russell was born in Whiston, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where he grew up. His parents worked in a book publisher's and often encouraged him to read. After leaving school with one O-level in English, he first became a ladies' hairdresser and ran his own salon. Russell then undertook a variety of jobs, also the first play he wrote was Keep Your Eyes Down Low (1975). His first success was a play about The Beatles called John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert. Originally commissioned for the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool was transferring to the West End in 1974. Educating Rita (1980) concerned a fe

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Brian Friel

Brian Friel is a playwright and, more recently, director of his own works from Ireland who now resides in County Donegal.

Friel was born in Omagh County Tyrone, the son of Patrick "Paddy" Friel, a primary school teacher and later a borough councillor in Derry, and Mary McLoone, postmistress of Glenties, County Donegal (Ulf Dantanus provides the most detail regarding Friel's parents and grandparents, see Books below). He received his education at St. Columb's College in Derry and the seminary at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth (1945-48) from which he received his B.A., then he received his teacher's training at St. Mary's Training College in Belfast, 1949-50. He married Anne Morrison in 1954, with whom he has four daughters and one son; they

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Colin Dexter

Norman Colin Dexter was an English crime writer, known for his Inspector Morse novels.

He started writing mysteries in 1972 during a family holiday: "We were in a little guest house halfway between Caernarfon and Pwllheli. It was a Saturday and it was raining - it's not unknown for it to rain in North Wales. The children were moaning ... I was sitting at the kitchen table with nothing else to do, and I wrote the first few paragraphs of a potential detective novel." Last Bus to Woodstock was published in 1975 and introduced the world to the character of Inspector Morse, the irascible detective whose penchants for cryptic crosswords, English literature, cask ale and Wagner reflect Dexter's own enthusiasms. Dexter's plots are notable for his us

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Josephine Tey

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 Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant.

The first of these, The Man in the Queue (1929) was published under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot , whose name also appears on the title page of another of her 1929 novels, Kif; An Unvarnished History. She also used the Daviot by-line for a biography of the 17th century cavalry leader John Graham, which was entitled Claverhouse (1937).

Mackintosh also wrote plays (both one act and full length), some of which were produced during her lifetime, under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot. The district of Daviot, near h

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Maxwell Anderson

Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright, poet, and journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1933, for Both Your Houses, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for both Winterset and High Tor.

Several of his plays were adapted into successful movies, including Anne of the Thousand Days and Key Largo.

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Patrick Hamilton

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

He was born Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton in the Sussex village of Hassocks, near Brighton, to writer parents. Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and ended just after his fifteenth birthday when his mother withdrew him from Westminster School.

After a brief career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as

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E.M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".

He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of person

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Stuart Maconie

Stuart Maconie is a TV and radio presenter, journalist, columnist and author.

He is the UK’s best-selling travel writer of non-TV tie-in books and his Pies and Prejudice was one of 2008’s top selling paperbacks. His work has been compared with Bill Bryson, Alan Bennett and John Peel and described by The Times as a 'National Treasure'.

He co-hosts the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 2 every Monday – Thursday evening, as well as The Freak Zone on 6Music on Sunday afternoons, and has written and presented dozens of other shows on BBC Radio. His TV work includes presenting the BBC's On Trial shows, Pop on Trial and Style on Trial, as well as Stuart Maconie’s TV Towns, a popular gazeteer of major British cities and their roles in modern cu

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George Mikes

George Mikes (pronounced Mik-esh) was a Hungarian-born British author best known for his humorous commentaries on various countries.

Mikes graduated in Budapest in 1933 and started work as a journalist on Reggel ("Morning"), a Budapest newspaper. For a short while he wrote a column called Intim Pista for Színházi Élet ("Theatre Life").

In 1938 Mikes became the London correspondent for Reggel and 8 Órao Ujság ("8 Hours"). He worked for Reggel until 1940. Having been sent to London to cover the Munich Crisis and expecting to stay for only a couple of weeks, he remained for the rest of his life. In 1946 he became a British Citizen. It is reported that being a Jew from Hungary was a factor in his decision. Mikes wrote in both Hungarian and Englis

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Noël Coward

Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English actor, playwright, and composer of popular music. Among his achievements, he received an Academy Certificate of Merit at the 1943 Academy Awards for "outstanding production achievement for In Which We Serve."

Known for his wit, flamboyance, and personal style, his plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture. The former Albery Theatre (originally the New Theatre) in London was renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in his honour in 2006.

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Anthony Seldon

Sir Anthony Francis Seldon, FRSA, FRHistS, FKC, is a British educator and contemporary historian. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history.

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Mona Baker

Professor of Translation Studies, Centre for Translation & Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester.

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Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature. He was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov.

Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the Western canon.

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Albert Camus

Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel Prize of 1957 for literature.

Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work.

He also adapted plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Requiem for a Nun of William Faulkner. One may trace his enjoyment of the theater back to his membership in l'Equipe, an Algerian group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectu

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Robert Marasco

Robert Marasco was born in the Bronx in 1936 and educated at Regis High School in Manhattan and Fordham University. A classical scholar, Marasco taught at Regis before turning to writing, with Child’s Play, an eerie melodrama about incidents of evil at a Catholic boys’ school. The play was a surprise success in 1970, running for 343 performances on Broadway and earning a Tony Award nomination for best play of the year, and was adapted for a 1972 film.

Marasco also wrote two novels: Burnt Offerings (1973) and Parlor Games (1979). Burnt Offerings was a bestseller and spawned a 1976 film adaptation directed by Dan Curtis and starring Oliver Reed, Karen Black, and Bette Davis.

Marasco died of lung cancer in 1998.

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Akala

Kingslee James McLean Daley, better known by the stage name Akala, is an English rapper, author, poet, and political activist.

Originally from Kentish Town, London he is the younger brother of rapper/vocalist Ms. Dynamite. In 2006, he was voted the Best Hip Hop Act at the MOBO Awards. He was awarded an honourary doctorate by the University of Brighton in 2018.

In May 2018, Akala published Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire. The book is part memoir, part polemic, on the subject of race in modern Britain.

Akala has given guest lectures at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex, Manchester Metropolitan University, Sydney University, Sheffield Hallam University, Cardiff University, and the International Slavery Museum, as well as

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Afua Hirsch

Afua Hirsch is a British writer and broadcaster. She has worked as a journalist for The Guardian newspaper, and was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017. She is the author of the 2018 book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, receiving a Jerwood Award while writing it.

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Alice Hemming

Alice Hemming is the author of over fifty books for children, including the bestselling Dark Unicorns series (Scholastic), and picture book, The Leaf Thief with illustrator Nicola Slater (Scholastic 2020), which has sold across the world and been translated into nineteen languages. Alice lives in Hertfordshire, UK with her husband and two children, and works in a writing shed at the top of her garden.

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Wilfred Owen

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the goodreads data base.

Wilfred Owen was a defining voice of British poetry during the First World War, renowned for his stark portrayals of trench warfare and gas attacks. Deeply influenced by Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met while recovering from shell shock, Owen’s work departed from the patriotic war verse of the time, instead conveying the brutal reality of combat and the suffering of soldiers. Among his best-known poems are Dulce et Decorum est, Anthem for Doomed Youth, and Strange Meeting—many of which were published only after his death.
Born in 1893 in Shropshire, Owen developed an early passion for poetry and religion, both of which would shape his artistic and moral worl

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John Gribbin

John R. Gribbin is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. His writings include quantum physics, human evolution, climate change, global warming, the origins of the universe, and biographies of famous scientists. He also writes science fiction.

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John Osborne

People best know British playwright John James Osborne, member of the Angry Young Men, for his play Look Back in Anger (1956); vigorous social protest characterizes works of this group of English writers of the 1950s.

This screenwriter acted and criticized the Establishment. The stunning success of Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than four decades, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and television. His extravagant and iconoclastic personal life flourished. He notoriously used language of the ornate violence on behalf of the political causes that he supported and against his own family, including his wives and children, who nevertheless often gave as good as they g

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Lana Del Rey

singer, song-writer, musician, and fashion model.

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Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer.

Larkin was born in city of Coventry, England, the only son and younger child

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Benjamin Zephaniah

A British-Jamaican writer, dub poet and Rastafari. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008.

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Rowena Akinyemi

Rowena Akinyemi is British, and after many years in Africa, she now lives and works in Cambridge. She was worked in English Language Teaching for twenty years, in Africa and England, and has been writing ELT fiction for ten years. Love or money? Was her first story for the Oxford Bookworms Library, and she has now written several other stories for the series, including Remeber Miranda and The Witches of Pendle (both at Stage 1). She has also written books for children. One of her favourite pastimes is reading detective stories.

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Lorenzo Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte (10 March 1749 – 17 August 1838) was a Venetian opera librettist and poet. He wrote the librettos for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's greatest operas, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte.

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Cathryn Constable

Cathryn Constable read Theology at Cambridge University. She then worked at Vogue, W, Elle Decoration, Elle and The Independent.

She also wrote for a number of publications including Tatler, and The Sunday Times, before turning her hand to writing for children.

She is married with three children and lives in Islington, London.

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Jen Green

Jen Green is a British author of over 300 non-fiction books for children and adults. She earned a doctorate in English literature from Sussex University and became a full-time writer after a career in publishing. She lives near the Sussex Downs.

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Marshall Berman

Marshall Berman (born 1940, The Bronx, New York City) is an American philosopher and Marxist Humanist writer. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching Political Philosophy and Urbanism.

An alumnus of Columbia University, Berman completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1968. He is on the editorial board of Dissent and a regular contributor to The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bennington Review, New Left Review, New Politics and the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

His major work is All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience Of Modernity. His most recent publication is the anthology, New York Calling:

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Stuart Slade

Stuart Slade was Director of the Consulting Group at Forecast International in Newtown, CT, a company which provides Market Intelligence for the world's Aerospace/Defense industries. He was also the primary analyst for the company's Warships Forecast and Industrial & Marine Turbine Forecast. In other defense related areas, he wrote United States Strategic Bombers 1945-2012, Littoral Warfare: Ships and Systems, Navies in the Nuclear Age and Multinational Naval Operations. He was also the successful author of 14 published novels including an alternate history series that began with his 2007 novel The Big One. He died in December 2020.

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Christine Lindop

Christine Lindop was born in New Zealand where she began her teaching career. She later taught EFL in France and Spain before settling in Great Britain, and has worked as an editor, proofreader, and writer since 1993.

With Oxford University Press, Christine has worked extensively on the Oxford Bookworms Library and is the Series Editor for Oxford Bookworms Factfiles. Her original titles include Sally's Phone and Red Roses (Starters), Ned Kelly: A True Story (Stage 1), and Australia and New Zealand (Stage 3). She has also adapted Goldfish (Stage 3) and two volumes of World Stories, The Long White Cloud: Stories from New Zealand (Stage 3) and Doors to a Wider Place: Stories from Australia (Stage 4), and edited A Tangled Web for the Oxford Book

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Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 14, 1963) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. Odets was born in Philadelphia to Louis Odets (born Gorodetsky) and Pearl Geisinger, Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high school after two years to become an actor. In 1931, he became a founding member of the Group Theatre, a highly influential New York theatre company that utilized an acting technique new to the United States. This technique was based on the system devised by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski. It was further developed by Group Theatre director Lee Strasberg and became known as The Method or Method Acting. Odets eventually

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Stanley Houghton

Stanley Houghton was born at 1 Amy Villas, Doveston Road, Ashton-upon-Mersey, Sale, which was then in Cheshire, the only son of John Hartley Houghton, a cotton merchant, and Lucy Mary née Darbyshire.In 1896, the family moved to 2 Athol Road, Alexandra Park, Manchester, some two miles from the city centre. Houghton was educated at Bowdon College and at Manchester Grammar School. On leaving school in 1897, he started working full time in his father's office and continued to do this until 1912. During this time he was an amateur actor and writer. In 1905–06 he was an unpaid drama critic for the Manchester City News and between 1905 and 1913 he contributed articles, theatrical notices and literary reviews to the Manchester Guardian. He also wro

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Robert Swindells

Robert Swindells was born in Bradford in 1939, the eldest of five children. He left the local Secondary Modern School at fifteen to work as a copy holder on the local newspaper. At seventeen he enlisted in the RAF and served for three years, two in Germany. On being discharged he worked as a clerk, engineer and printer until 1969 when he entered college to train as a teacher having obtained five 'O' levels at night-school. His first book 'When Darkness Comes' was written as a college thesis and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1972. In 1980 he gave up teaching to write full time. He likes travelling and visits many schools each year, talking and reading stories to children. He is the secutatry of his local Peace Movement group. Brother

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Kim Slater

Librarian Note: Kim Slater is a pen name of K.L. Slater, at which site biographical information may be found.

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Sacha Guitry

Sacha Guitry was a French stage actor, film actor, film director, screenwriter, and playwright of the Boulevard theatre.

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Sarah Daniels

Sarah Daniels (born November 1956 in London [1]) is a British dramatist. She has been a prolific writer since her first professionally performed play, Ripen Our Darkness, was given a production at the Royal Court in 1981.

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Dennis Kelly

THEATRE INCLUDES: Debris (Theatre503/BAC); Osama the Hero (Hampstead); After the End (Paines Plough/Traverse/The Bush/UK and international tour); Love and Money (Young Vic/Royal Exchange); Taking Care of Baby (Hampstead/Birmingham Rep); Orphans (Paines Plough/Traverse/Birmingham Rep/Soho). Plays for young people include: DNA (National Theatre) and Our Teacher is a Troll (National Theatre of Scotland). He also co-wrote the comedy series Pulling (BBC3) and wrote and created Utopia (Channel 4).

His plays have been performed in over thirty countries worldwide and translated into twenty languages.

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Alan Spence

Alan Spence (born 1947) is a Scottish writer and is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen, where he is also artistic director of the annual WORD Festival. He was born in Glasgow, and much of his work is set in the city.

Spence is an award-winning poet and playwright, novelist and short-story writer. His first work was the collection of short stories Its Colours They are Fine, first published in 1977. This was followed by two plays, Sailmaker in 1982 and Space Invaders in 1983. The novel The Magic Flute appeared in 1990 along with his first book of poetry, Glasgow Zen. In 1991, another of his plays, Changed Days, was published before a brief hiatus. He returned in 1996 with Stone Garden, another collection of short stori

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Patrick Hamilton

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

He was born Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton in the Sussex village of Hassocks, near Brighton, to writer parents. Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and ended just after his fifteenth birthday when his mother withdrew him from Westminster School.

After a brief career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as

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Marga Minco

Marga Minco (pseudoniem van Sara Minco) debuteerde in 1957 met Het bittere kruid, bekroond met de Vijverbergprijs (nu F. Bordewijkprijs). Ook haar latere werk, De andere kant (1959), Een leeg huis (1966), De val (1983), De glazen brug (1986), Nagelaten dagen (1997) en de bundel verzamelde verhalen Achter de muur (2010), had veelal de Tweede Wereldoorlog en de nasleep daarvan als onderwerp. Voor haar oeuvre ontving Minco de Annie Romeinprijs (1999), de Constantijn Huygensprijs (2005) en de P. C. Hooftprijs (2019). Haar boeken zijn in vele talen vertaald.

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Andy Mulligan

Andy Mulligan was brought up in the south of London. He worked as a theatre director for ten years before travels in Asia prompted him to retrain as a teacher. He has taught English and drama in India, Brazil, the Philippines and the UK. He now divides his time between London and Manila.

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Willy Russell

William Russell is a British dramatist, lyricist, and composer. His best-known works are Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, and Blood Brothers.

Willy Russell was born in Whiston, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where he grew up. His parents worked in a book publisher's and often encouraged him to read. After leaving school with one O-level in English, he first became a ladies' hairdresser and ran his own salon. Russell then undertook a variety of jobs, also the first play he wrote was Keep Your Eyes Down Low (1975). His first success was a play about The Beatles called John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert. Originally commissioned for the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool was transferring to the West End in 1974. Educating Rita (1980) concerned a fe

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Anne-Marie Conway

Anne-Marie Conway is a primary school teacher specialising in drama, but also runs her own children’s theatre company, Full Circle. She lives in London with her husband, two young sons and two eccentric cats, Betty and Boo. Anne-Marie has written a number of humorous sketches which have been performed by her theatre company, but "Phoebe finds her voice", shortlisted for the inaugural Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition, is her first novel.

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Paul Bailey

Peter Harry "Paul" Bailey was a British novelist and critic, as well as a biographer of Cynthia Payne and Quentin Crisp.

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Maxwell Anderson

Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright, poet, and journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1933, for Both Your Houses, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for both Winterset and High Tor.

Several of his plays were adapted into successful movies, including Anne of the Thousand Days and Key Largo.

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George Mikes

George Mikes (pronounced Mik-esh) was a Hungarian-born British author best known for his humorous commentaries on various countries.

Mikes graduated in Budapest in 1933 and started work as a journalist on Reggel ("Morning"), a Budapest newspaper. For a short while he wrote a column called Intim Pista for Színházi Élet ("Theatre Life").

In 1938 Mikes became the London correspondent for Reggel and 8 Órao Ujság ("8 Hours"). He worked for Reggel until 1940. Having been sent to London to cover the Munich Crisis and expecting to stay for only a couple of weeks, he remained for the rest of his life. In 1946 he became a British Citizen. It is reported that being a Jew from Hungary was a factor in his decision. Mikes wrote in both Hungarian and Englis

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Mona Baker

Professor of Translation Studies, Centre for Translation & Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester.

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Bali Rai

Bali Rai was born in 1971 and grew up in Leicester. As a child, Bali wanted to be a footballer or to write stories. Always an avid reader, he hails Sue Townsend, Douglas Adams and Robert Swindells as his writing heroes. Bali grew up reading Dr Seuss and Meg and Mog and his first book purchase was The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. He realised he wasn't good enough to play for Liverpool F.C. and after gaining a politics degree in London he returned to his home city and combined a variety of jobs in pubs and clubs with completing his first novel. Bali set about writing a story he had been thinking about for many years. He wanted to write accessible material for children of all ages and backgrounds and realising there were no British Asian

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Helen Edmundson

Helen Edmundson is a British playwright and screenwriter. She has won awards and critical acclaim both for her original writing and for her adaptations of various literary classics for the stage and screen.

Edmundson was born in Liverpool, in 1964. Most of her childhood was spent on the Wirral and in Chester. She studied Drama at Manchester University.

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Owen Sheers

OWEN SHEERS is a poet, author and playwright. His first novel, Resistance, was translated into ten languages and adapted into a film. The Dust Diaries, his Zimbabwean nonfiction narrative, won the Wales Book of the Year Award. His awards for poetry and drama include the Somerset Maugham Award for Skirrid Hill, the Hay Festival Medal for Poetry and Wales Book of the Year Award for Pink Mist, and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award for his play The Two Worlds of Charlie F. His most recent novel is I Saw a Man, which was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger. He lives in Wales with his wife and daughter. He has been a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow and is currently Professor in Creativity at Swansea University.

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William Cook

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

See also:
William Cook, 1849-1904, poultry
William Cook*, horror, thrillers
William Cook, chess
William Cook, comedians

William J. Cook*, suspense, mystery
William J. Cook, mathematics
William J. Cook Jr., criminal justice
William J. Cook Jr., education
William John Cook, WWII vet
William R. Cook, history, philosophy
William Wallace Cook, 1867-1933
William Wesley Cook, 1859-1936
William Wilson Cook, 1858-1930, law

An author marked with an asterisk (*) indicates a Goodreads author.

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Chad Orzel

Chad Orzel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

He studied at University of Maryland, College Park, MD: PhD in Chemical Physics, 1999 and Williams College, Williamstown, MA: BA in Physics, 1993.

From 1999-2001, Chad was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Physics Department at Yale University, studying Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) in the group of Mark Kasevich.

Chad has published in Science Magazine, Physics World and his PhD thesis research was carried out in the Laser Cooling Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

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Shelagh Stephenson

Shelagh Stephenson was born in Northumberland and read drama at Manchester University. She has written several original plays for BBC Radio. These include Darling Peidi, about the Thompson and Bywater murder case, which was broadcast in the Monday Play series in 1993; a Saturday Night Theatre, The Anatomical Venus, broadcast in the following year; and Five Kinds of Silence (1996), which won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Original Drama. Her first stage play, The Memory of Water, opened at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in July 1996, and her second, An Experiment With An Air Pump, joint winner of the 1997 Peggy Ramsay Award, opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in February 1998. Also Life is a Dream, and Through a Glass Darkl

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Peter Nichols

NOT alias for John Christopher

Peter Nichols was an English playwright, screenwriter, and journalist known for his sharp wit and incisive social commentary. His most celebrated works, including A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, The National Health, and Privates on Parade, blend comedy with profound explorations of human struggles, often drawing from his own life experiences.
Born in Bristol, Nichols served in the British Army’s Combined Services Entertainment Unit before studying acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He initially gained recognition writing for television before transitioning to the stage, where his plays tackled themes such as illness, war, and personal betrayal, frequently using humor as a counterpoint to tragedy. His d

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Una Marson

Una Maud Victoria Marson was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes.

She travelled to London in 1932 and became the first black woman to be employed by the BBC during World War II. In 1942, she became producer of the programme Calling the West Indies, turning it into Caribbean Voices, which became an important forum for Caribbean literary work.

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Alexei Sayle

Alexei Sayle is an English stand-up comedian, actor, author and former recording artist, and was a central figure in the British alternative comedy movement in the 1980s.
Wikipedia

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Little Mix

Back in 2011 when Perrie, Jesy, Leigh-Anne and Jade met, they originally auditioned for the X Factor as solo performers, but under the mentoring of Tulisa Contostavlos they joined forces to become Little Mix, X Factor’s first ever victorious group. Having captured the hearts and minds of the nation with their winning chemistry, musical sensibility and breath-taking vocal prowess, the girls shot straight to No.1 with their debut single ‘Cannonball’.

Five months after winning the 2011 series of The X Factor, Little Mix are set to triumphantly return with their new single ‘Wings’. Signed to Syco Music, Little Mix have already been wowing live arenas and crowds with their performances on the X Factor Tour, while they have been announced as the s

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Michael Williams

Michael Williams is a writer of plays, musicals, operas, and novels and the Managing Director of Cape Town Opera in South Africa. He began writing "radio plays" while studying at University of Cape Town and had his first novel published when he was twenty-five years old. He has written operas for young people based on African mythology as well as the libretti for symphonic operas that have premiered around the world. Michael is the author of several books, including the highly praised young adult novel Crocodile Burning. He finds writing fiction to be the perfect antidote to the drama of keeping an opera company alive in Africa.

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Margery Lawrence

Margery Harriet Lawrence (alternate pen names: Jerome Latimer, Margery H. Lawrence) was an English romantic fiction, fantasy fiction, horror fiction and detective fiction author who specialized in ghost stories.

Her father was solicitor Richard J. Lawrence, her mother was called Grace, and she had at least two siblings Allan and Monica. Her father published her early poetry in Songs of Childhood, and Other Verses, in 1913.

Lawrence was also an illustrator, and producing drawings for The Hills of Ruel, and Other Stories (1921) by Fiona MacLeod.

Her earliest collections, the Round Table sequence, include Nights of the Round Table (1926) and The Terraces of Night (1932). Stefan Dziemianowicz describes these stories as "simple but solidly told tal

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Ena Lamont Stewart

Ena Lamont Stewart was a Scottish playwright. She was the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister whose family was originally from Canada and had settled in Glasgow. She married the Scottish actor Jack Stewart and they had a son, William. The couple joined Glasgow's MSU Repertory Theatre in Rutherglen.

Stewart was disturbed by the poverty in the Gorbals. She became a receptionist at the Sick Children's Hospital and witnessed malnutrition and other diseases.

Her first play was Distinguished Company. Her second play, Starched Aprons, was about the everyday trials of hospital life. Her third play, Men Should Weep, was a major theatrical landmark for the representation of Scottish class and women's issues. Glasgow Unity Theatre first performed

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Ann Marie Di Mambro

Ann Marie Di Mambro is a Scottish playwright and television screenwriter of Italian extraction. Her theatre plays have been performed widely; they are also published individually and in collections and are studied in schools for the Scottish curriculum's Higher Drama and English.

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J.B. Priestley

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