Authors Similar like Jackie Kay

Roy Williams

Born and brought up in Notting Hill, London, Roy Samuel Williams became a full time writer in his 20s after he took a theatre-writing degree at Rose Bruford College. His first full-length play was The No Boys Cricket Club, which premiered in 1996 at Theatre Royal Stratford East, since when he has had plays produced at the Royal Court, The Bush Theatre, The Hampstead Theatre and the National Theatre.

Williams has done work in television, including adapting his own play Fallout and also co-wrote the script for the 2014 British film Fast Girls. He has also written a police procedural series for BBC Radio The Interrogation.

In 2011, Williams received the best play award for Sucker Punch at the Writers Guild Awards. In 2020, he received an RTS nom

Buy books on Amazon

Elijah Wald

Elijah Wald is a musician and writer, with nine published books. Most are about music (blues, folk, world, and Mexican drug ballads), with one about hitchhiking.
His new book is a revisionist history of popular music, throwing out the usual critical conventions and instead looking at what mainstream pop fans were actually listening and dancing to over the years.
At readings, he also plays guitar and sings...why not?"

Buy books on Amazon

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.

Buy books on Amazon

Nick Hornby

Nicholas Peter John Hornby is an English writer and lyricist. He is best known for his memoir Fever Pitch (1992) and novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, all of which were adapted into feature films. Hornby's work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide as of 2018. In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Hornby was named the 29th most influential person in British culture. He has received two Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay nominations for An Education (2009), and Brooklyn (2015).

Buy books on Amazon

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and Joh

Buy books on Amazon

Saul Bellow

Novels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include Dangling Man in 1944 and Humboldt's Gift in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1976 for literature.

People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.

Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a yo

Buy books on Amazon

Andrew O'Hagan

Andrew O'Hagan, FRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author.

He is the author of the novels Our Fathers, Personality, and Be Near Me, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and The Guardian (U.K.). In 2003, O’Hagan was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. He lives in London, England.

Buy books on Amazon

Ira Levin

Levin graduated from the Horace Mann School and New York University, where he majored in philosophy and English.

After college, he wrote training films and scripts for television.

Levin's first produced play was No Time for Sergeants (adapted from Mac Hyman's novel), a comedy about a hillbilly drafted into the United States Air Force that launched the career of Andy Griffith. The play was turned into a movie in 1958, and co-starred Don Knotts, Griffith's long-time co-star and friend. No Time for Sergeants is generally considered the precursor to Gomer Pyle, USMC.

Levin's first novel, A Kiss Before Dying, was well received, earning him the 1954 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. A Kiss Before Dying was turned into a movie twice, first in 1956,

Buy books on Amazon

Jacqueline Wilson

Jacqueline Wilson was born in Bath in 1945, but spent most of her childhood in Kingston-on-Thames. She always wanted to be a writer and wrote her first ‘novel’ when she was nine, filling in countless Woolworths’ exercise books as she grew up. As a teenager she started work for a magazine publishing company and then went on to work as a journalist on Jackie magazine (which she was told was named after her!) before turning to writing novels full-time.

One of Jacqueline’s most successful and enduring creations has been the famous Tracy Beaker, who first appeared in 1991 in The Story of Tracy Beaker. This was also the first of her books to be illustrated by Nick Sharratt. Since then Jacqueline has been on countless awards shortlists and has gone

Buy books on Amazon

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

Buy books on Amazon

Louise Welsh

After studying history at Glasgow University, Louise Welsh established a second-hand bookshop, where she worked for many years. Her first novel, The Cutting Room, won several awards, including the 2002 Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger, and was jointly awarded the 2002 Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Louise was granted a Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award in 2003, a Scotland on Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award in 2004, and a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2005.

She is a regular radio broadcaster, has published many short stories, and has contributed articles and reviews to most of the British broadsheets. She has also written for the stage. The Guardian chose her as a 'woman to watch' in

Buy books on Amazon

Sarah Kane

Sarah Kane was an English playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form, and, in her earlier work, the use of stylized violent stage action. Kane battled with depression, and her life was brought to a premature end when she committed suicide at London's King's College Hospital. Her published work consists of five plays and one short film, Skin.

Buy books on Amazon

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

Buy books on Amazon

Yōko Ogawa

Yōko Ogawa (小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

A film in French, "L'Annulaire“ (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Og

Buy books on Amazon

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.

Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.

She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'

She lives in Brighton, England.

Buy books on Amazon

James Kelman

Kelman says:

My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city. Four brothers, my mother a full time parent, my father in the picture framemaking and gilding trade, trying to operate a one man business and I left school at 15 etc. etc. (...) For one reason or another, by the age of 21/22 I decided to write stories. The stories I wanted to write would derive from my own background, my own socio-cultural experience. I wanted to write as one of my own people, I wanted to write and remain a member of my own community.

During the 1970s he published a first collection of short stories. He became involved in Philip H

Buy books on Amazon

Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.

He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film

Buy books on Amazon

Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell (born 1972, Coleraine Northern Ireland) is a British author of contemporary fiction, who features in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. It is possible to identify several common themes in her novels - the relationship between sisters is one, another is loss and the psychological impact of those losses on the lives of her characters.

Buy books on Amazon

Don Paterson

Don Paterson (b. 1963) is a Scottish poet and writer. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, memoir and poetic theory. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, three Forward Prizes, the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of St. Andrews, and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador MacMillan. He has long had a parallel career as a jazz guitarist.

He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.

Buy books on Amazon

Luke Sutherland

Luke Sutherland was born in London and was brought up in Orkney by his adopted parents. He was educated at Glasgow University, where he read English and philosophy. He is a musician and songwriter and was a founder member of the band Long Fin Killie, with whom he released three albums. He has played violin with Mogwai and his most recent music project is Music A.M. His first novel, Jelly Roll (1998), the story of a struggling Glaswegian jazz band, was shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel, Sweetmeat (2002), set in a London restaurant, narrates the adventures of head chef Bohemond.

Luke Sutherland's latest novel is Venus as a Boy (2004), an exploration of a modern-day myth about the power of love. It is being

Buy books on Amazon

Janice Galloway

Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire in 1955 where she worked as a teacher for ten years. Her first novel, The Trick is to keep Breathing, now widely considered to be a contemporary Scottish classic, was published in 1990. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, Scottish First Book and Aer Lingus Awards, and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. The stage adaptation has been performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, the Du Maurier Theatre, Toronto and the Royal Court in London. Her second book, Blood, shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, People's Prize and Satire Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the McVitie's Prize in 1994. That same year, and for all three books

Buy books on Amazon

Daljit Nagra

Daljit Nagra has published four poetry collections with Faber & Faber. He has won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Collection, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award. His books have been nominated for the Costa Prize and twice for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and he has been selected as a New Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society. He is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for Radio 4 & 4 Extra, and presents a weekly programme, Poetry Extra, on Radio 4 Extra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was elected to its Council, and is a trustee of the Arvon Trust. He has judged many prizes including the Samuel Johnson Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Prize, the David Cohen Prize an

Buy books on Amazon

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, née Stevenson (29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.

AKA:
Елізабет Гаскелл (Ukrainian)

Buy books on Amazon

Jenni Fagan

Jenni Fagan has published four fiction novels, one non-fiction memoir, seven books of poetry and had scripts produced for stage and screen. She has three degrees, concluding as Dr. Of Philosophy, specialising in structuralism.

Jenni is an award winning, critically acclaimed poet and novelist. She is published in eight languages. A Granta Best of Young British Novelist (once-in-a-decade-accolade), Scottish Novelist of the Year (2016), Pushchart nominated, on lists for BBC International Short Story Prize, Impac Dublin, The Sunday Times Short Story Award, Encore, among others. The New York Times called her The Patron Saint of Literary Street Urchins.

Fagan is also an artist who exhibits canvas and sculptures, her bone artworks are on permanent d

Buy books on Amazon

Edgar Allan Poe

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre c

Buy books on Amazon

James Robertson

James Robertson (born 1958) is a Scottish writer who grew up in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire. He is the author of several short story and poetry collections, and has published four novels: The Fanatic, Joseph Knight, The Testament of Gideon Mack, and And the Land Lay Still. Joseph Knight was named both the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and the Saltire Society Book of the Year in 2003/04. The Testament of Gideon Mack was long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. And the Land Lay Still was awarded the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award in 2010. Robertson has also established an independent publishing imprint called Kettillonia, which produces occasional pamphlets and books of poetry and short prose, and he is a co-founder and

Buy books on Amazon

Anthony Anaxagorou

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator.

His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Granta, Ambit, The Adroit Journal, The London Magazine, The Rialto and elsewhere. His poetry and fiction have appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts.

His second collection After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins is a Poetry Book Society recommendation. It was selected as one of The Telegraph’s and The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2019 and shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize.

He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fictio

Buy books on Amazon

Sam Selvon

Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish.He was educated at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter, he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack, and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London in the 1950s, and then in the late 1

Buy books on Amazon

Eva Baltasar

Eva Baltasar is a Catalan poet and writer. She has a bachelor's degree in Pedagogy from the University of Barcelona. She has published ten books of poetry, which have earned numerous awards including the 2008 Miquel de Palol, the 2010 Benet Ribas, and the 2015 Gabriel Ferrater. Permafrost was her first novel.

Buy books on Amazon

Alaíde Ventura

Ciclista y tía.

Buy books on Amazon

J.M. Barrie

James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successful novels and plays.

The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh. He took up journalism for a newspaper in Nottingham and contributed to various London journals before moving there in 1885. His early Auld Licht Idylls (1889) and A Window in Thrums (1889) contain fictional sketches of Scottish life representative of the Kailyard school. The publication of The Little Minister (1891) established his reputation as a novelist. During the next decade, Barrie continued to write novels, but gradually, his interest turn

Buy books on Amazon

Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead is a Scottish poet and dramatist, originally from Newarthill in North Lanarkshire. In the early 1970s she joined Philip Hobsbaum's writers' group, a crucible of creative activity - other members were Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Tom Leonard. Her plays include Blood and Ice, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), Perfect Days (2000) and a highly acclaimed adaptation into Scots of Molière's Tartuffe (1985). Her adaptation of Euripides' Medea won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001. Like her work for theatre, her poetry is alive with vigorous speech idioms; collections include True Confessions and New Clichés (1985), Bagpipe Muzak (1991) and Dreaming Frankenstein: and Collected Poems (1984

Buy books on Amazon

Hannah Lavery

Hannah Lavery (b. 1977) is a Scottish short story writer, poet, playwright and performer. Her poetry and prose has been published by Gutter Magazine, The Scotsman newspaper, 404 Ink, and others. In September 2021 she took on the role of Edinburgh Makar.

Buy books on Amazon

John McGrath

John Peter McGrath was an English playwright and theatre theorist who took up the cause of Scottish agency in his plays. From an Irish Catholic background, McGrath was educated in Mold and, after his National Service, at St John's College, Oxford. During the early 1960s he worked for the BBC, and wrote and directed many of the early episodes of the Corporation's police series Z-Cars which began in 1962.

He is remembered as a playwright and for his theoretical formulation of the principles of a radical, popular theatre. The 7:84 Theatre Company was established in 1971 by McGrath, his wife, Elizabeth MacLennan, and her brother, David MacLennan, and The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), his best-known play, was created with the

Buy books on Amazon

Willa Muir

Willa Muir was a Scottish novelist, essayist and translator. She was born Wilhelmina Johnston Anderson in Montrose in 1890. She studied Classics at the University of St. Andrews, graduating in 1910. In 1919 she married the poet Edwin Muir. Her Women: An Inquiry is a book-length feminist essay. She translated the works of many notable German authors including Franz Kafka.

Buy books on Amazon

Siobhan Dowd

Siobhan Dowd was born to Irish parents and brought up in London. She spent much of her youth visiting the family cottage in Aglish, County Waterford and later the family home in Wicklow Town.

She attended a Catholic grammar school in south London and then gained a degree in Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. After a short stint in publishing, she joined the writer's organization PEN, initially as a researcher for its Writers in Prison Committee.

She went on to be Program Director of PEN American Center's Freedom-to-Write Committee in New York City. Her work here included founding and leading the Rushdie Defense Committee USA and traveling to Indonesia and Guatemala to investigate local human rights conditions for writers. Dur

Buy books on Amazon

Francis Davis

Francis Davis was an American author and journalist. He was best known as the jazz critic for The Village Voice, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly. He had also worked in radio and film, and taught courses on Jazz and Blues at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a 1994 recipient of the Pew Fellowships in the Arts.

Buy books on Amazon

Zaffar Kunial

'You’ve probably read from England’s Green by Zaffar Kunial without realising it. ‘Foxglove Country’, the opening poem of his second collection, was widely shared after it was published online. Though they prefer the partial shade of a hedgerow or woodland, foxgloves will grow almost anywhere in England. Kunial’s poetry is perhaps even more generous and abundant ... There's a near-perfectness to the book ... Simply brilliant,'
Review 31

'His ability to convey moments of sheer loveliness remains unmatched; his style is simple, declarative, elegant. A guarded sense of the spiritual provides another thread to bind the poems together. Ings, a long poem that braids JL Carr and a speed awareness course into a meditation on mourning, is a brilliant

Buy books on Amazon

Ali Smith

Ali Smith is a writer, born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. She has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.

Buy books on Amazon

Angela Carter

Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.

She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a co

Buy books on Amazon

Jeanette Winterson

Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.

She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and al

Buy books on Amazon

Nan Shepherd

Nan (Anna) Shepherd was a Scottish novelist and poet. She was an early Scottish Modernist writer, who wrote three standalone novels set in small, fictional, communities in North Scotland. The Scottish landscape and weather played a major role in her novels and were the focus of her poetry. Shepherd also wrote one non-fiction book on hill walking, based on her experiences walking in the Cairngorms. An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, she made many visits to the Cairngorms with students and friends. She also travelled further afield - to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa. Shepherd was a lecturer of English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.

Shepherd was a friend of the writers Agnes Mure Macke

Buy books on Amazon

Susan Nussbaum

Susan Nussbaum’s plays have been widely produced. In 2008 she was cited by the Utne Reader as one of ‘50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World’ for her work with girls with disabilities. Good Kings, Bad Kings is her first novel. She lives in Chicago, America.

Buy books on Amazon

Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker (Born 1954) is a Scottish Muslim poet, artist and documentary film-maker.

She was born in Lahore to Pakistani parents. She was brought up in Glasgow where her family moved when she was less than a year old. She was married to Simon Powell, the founder of the organization Poetry Live, who passed away in October 2009 after surviving cancer for eleven years. Dharker divides her time between London, Wales, and Mumbai. She says she describes herself as a "Scottish Muslim Calvinist". Her daughter Ayesha Dharker, {whose father is Anil Dharker}, is a well known actress in international films, TV and stage.

As of 2010 she has written five books of poetry Purdah (1989), Postcards from God (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001), The Terrori

Buy books on Amazon

Gerri Hirshey

Gerri Hirshey is a journalist and author with 25 years of experience in newspapers, magazines and book publishing. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and many more.

Buy books on Amazon

Muriel Spark

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN f

Buy books on Amazon

Catherine Belsey

Catherine Belsey is currently Research Professor at Swansea University and formerly Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. Best known for her pioneering book, Critical Practice (Methuen, 1980), Catherine Belsey has an international reputation as a deft and sophisticated critical theorist and subtle and eloquent critic of literature, particularly of Renaissance texts. Her main area of work is on the implications of poststructuralist theory for aspects of cultural history and criticism. Her present project is ’Culture and the Real’, a consideration of the limitations of contemporary constructivism in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Professor Belsey chairs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, a research forum for

Buy books on Amazon

Dean Atta

Dean was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize for his debut poetry collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger. His poems have been anthologised by Bad Betty Press, Emma Press, Stripes Publishing, Team Angelica and have appeared on BBC One, BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service and Channel 4. Dean was named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday. He regularly performs across the UK and internationally. Dean is a member of Keats House Poets Forum and Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. He has a Philosophy and English BA from the University of Sussex and a Writer/Teacher MA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Dean is a Tutor for Arvon and Poetry School and a Writer in Residence for First Story. His debut novel, The Bla

Buy books on Amazon

Sarah Kane

Sarah Kane was an English playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form, and, in her earlier work, the use of stylized violent stage action. Kane battled with depression, and her life was brought to a premature end when she committed suicide at London's King's College Hospital. Her published work consists of five plays and one short film, Skin.

Buy books on Amazon

Gregory Burke

Gregory Burke (born 1968) is a Scottish playwright from Rosyth, Fife, Scotland.

Gregory Burke's first play was Gagarin Way, set in the factories of West Fife. His play, Black Watch, for the National Theatre of Scotland, debuted at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival, meeting with critical acclaim, and has since been performed throughout Scotland and has also toured theatres in London, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. He has also written Occy Eyes, The Straits, Unsecured, On Tour, Liar and Shell shocked. His most recent play was Hoors, which opened at the Traverse Theatre on 1 May 2009.

His play Black Watch won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Play, the South Bank Show Theatre Award in 2007 and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best

Buy books on Amazon

Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.

He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film

Buy books on Amazon

James Robertson

James Robertson (born 1958) is a Scottish writer who grew up in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire. He is the author of several short story and poetry collections, and has published four novels: The Fanatic, Joseph Knight, The Testament of Gideon Mack, and And the Land Lay Still. Joseph Knight was named both the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and the Saltire Society Book of the Year in 2003/04. The Testament of Gideon Mack was long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. And the Land Lay Still was awarded the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award in 2010. Robertson has also established an independent publishing imprint called Kettillonia, which produces occasional pamphlets and books of poetry and short prose, and he is a co-founder and

Buy books on Amazon

Don Paterson

Don Paterson (b. 1963) is a Scottish poet and writer. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorism, criticism, memoir and poetic theory. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, three Forward Prizes, the T.S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of St. Andrews, and for twenty-five years was Poetry Editor at Picador MacMillan. He has long had a parallel career as a jazz guitarist.

He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus.

Buy books on Amazon

Cao Yu

Cao Yu (曹禺; September 24, 1910—December 13, 1996), born as Wan Jiabao (萬家寶/万家宝), was a renowned Chinese playwright, often regarded as China's most important of the 20th century. His most well-known works are Thunderstorm (1933), Sunrise (1936) and Peking Man (1940). It is largely through the efforts of Cao Yu that the modern Chinese "spoken theater" took root in 20th-century Chinese literature.

Buy books on Amazon

Luke Sutherland

Luke Sutherland was born in London and was brought up in Orkney by his adopted parents. He was educated at Glasgow University, where he read English and philosophy. He is a musician and songwriter and was a founder member of the band Long Fin Killie, with whom he released three albums. He has played violin with Mogwai and his most recent music project is Music A.M. His first novel, Jelly Roll (1998), the story of a struggling Glaswegian jazz band, was shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel, Sweetmeat (2002), set in a London restaurant, narrates the adventures of head chef Bohemond.

Luke Sutherland's latest novel is Venus as a Boy (2004), an exploration of a modern-day myth about the power of love. It is being

Buy books on Amazon

Daljit Nagra

Daljit Nagra has published four poetry collections with Faber & Faber. He has won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Collection, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award. His books have been nominated for the Costa Prize and twice for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and he has been selected as a New Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society. He is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for Radio 4 & 4 Extra, and presents a weekly programme, Poetry Extra, on Radio 4 Extra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was elected to its Council, and is a trustee of the Arvon Trust. He has judged many prizes including the Samuel Johnson Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Prize, the David Cohen Prize an

Buy books on Amazon

Harry Josephine Giles

Harry Josephine Giles is a poet from Orkney. Their PhD on the possibilities of science fiction poetry for minority language literature became the verse-novel Deep Wheel Orcadia (2021). Tonguit (2015) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and their second book, The Games (2018), for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

Buy books on Amazon

Andrés N. Ordorica

Andrés N. Ordorica is a queer Latinx writer based in Edinburgh. His writing seeks to illuminate love and loss while unpacking what it means to be from ni de aquí, ni de allá. He is the author of the poetry collection At Least This I Know and Holy Boys and the novel How We Named the Stars. He has been shortlisted for the Kavya Prize, Morley Lit Prize, Mo Siewcharran Prize and Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of The Year. In 2024, he was selected as one of The Observer’s 10 Best Debut Novelists. The following year he was named by The Skinny as one of 12 of Scotland’s Next Generation of Writers.

Buy books on Amazon

Len Pennie

Len Pennie is a Scottish poet and Scots language and mental health advocate. She became known on social media in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland for her "Scots word of the day" and poem (Scots: poyum) videos. As of January 2024, her Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok accounts collectively number over 1.2 million followers worldwide.

Buy books on Amazon

Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker.

Buy books on Amazon

Nina Simone

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known by her stage name Nina Simone, was a fifteen-time Grammy Award-nominated American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger and civil rights activist.

Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is generally classified as a jazz musician. Simone originally aspired to become a classical pianist, but her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles besides her classical basis, such as jazz, soul, folk, R&B, gospel, and pop music. Her vocal style is characterized by intense passion, a loose vibrato, and a slightly androgynous timbre, in part due to her unusually low vocal range which veered between the alto and tenor ranges (occasionally even reaching baritone lows). Sometimes known as the High Priestes

Buy books on Amazon

Emily Wells

Emily Wells’ debut memoir, A Matter of Appearance, binds the author’s account of autoimmune disease to 19th-century French hysteria and discursive histories of ballet and illness. It has received praise from The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and others. Emily has an MFA in fiction from UC Riverside and teaches writing at UC Irvine. Formerly, she has been an editor at fashion and art magazines and a newspaper reporter. She lives in Los Angeles.

Buy books on Amazon

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

Buy books on Amazon

Tabitha Lasley

Tabitha Lasley was a journalist for ten years. She has lived in London, Johannesburg, and Aberdeen. SEA STATE is her first book.

Buy books on Amazon

Patricia Powell

Patricia Powell is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Mills College. She is the author four novels, including Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones (Beacon Press, 2003), The Pagoda (Harcourt, 1999), and The Fullness of Everything (Peepal Tree Press, 2009).

Excerpts from her novels as well as her short stories have been widely anthologized, and she has lectured and led creative writing workshops in literary venues both nationally and internationally.

In 1993 Powell was a finalist for Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists Award. Among other prizes, she is the recipient of a PEN New England Discovery Award, The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for fiction, and The Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Awar

Buy books on Amazon

Jackie Kay

Total similar authors (65)