Salley Vickers
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 read English at Newnham College Cambridge.
She has worked, variously, as a cleaner, a dancer, an artist’s model, a teacher of children with special needs, a university teacher of literature, and a psychoanalyst. Her first novel, ‘Miss Garnet’s Angel’, became an international word-of-mouth bestseller. She now writes full time and lectures widely on many subjects, particularly the connections between, art, literature, psychology and religion.
Her principal interests are opera, bird watching, dancing, and poetry. One of her father's favourite poets
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Pat Barker
Pat Barker is an English writer known for her fiction exploring themes of memory, trauma, and survival. She gained prominence with Union Street (1982), a stark portrayal of working-class women's lives, and later achieved critical acclaim with the Regeneration Trilogy (1991–1995), a series blending history and fiction to examine the psychological impact of World War I. The final book, The Ghost Road (1995), won the Booker Prize. In recent years, she has turned to retelling classical myths from a female perspective, beginning with The Silence of the Girls (2018). Barker's work is widely recognized for its direct and unflinching storytelling.
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Kate Summerscale
Kate Summerscale (born in 1965) is an English writer and journalist.
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She won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction in 2008 with The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House and won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 (and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography) for the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, about Joe Carstairs, "fastest woman on water."
As a journalist, she worked for The Independent and The Daily Telegraph and her articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. She stumbled on the story for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher in an 1890s anthology of unsolved crime stories and became so fascinated that she left her post as literary editor of The Daily Telegra -
Tina Seskis
Tina Seskis's first book, One Step Too Far, was released in 2013, and has since been published in 18 languages in over 60 countries.
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Tina has written five novels. Her latest, HOPE CLOSE, was released on 24th March 2020 and is a novel about staying home, hope and redemption...
Tina grew up in Hampshire, before going off to study in the beautiful city of Bath and then moving to London, where she has lived on and off ever since, now with her husband and son. -
Clare Whitfield
Clare Whitfield was born the fourth child to ex-Armed Forces parents. She grew up on St Helier Estate in Morden before moving to Sutton and currently lives in Hampshire.
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People of Abandoned Character, her first novel, was published in 2020 and won the Goldsboro Glass Bell 2021 Award and was shortlisted for the HWA Crime Debut 2021. The Gone and the Forgotten, her second novel, was published in June 2022. Her third novel, Poor Girls, was published in November 2024. -
Sharon Owens
Here are some questions I get asked a lot:
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DID YOU ALWAYS WANT TO BE A WRITER?
No, it never crossed my mind, though I have always loved books.
WHAT BOOKS DID YOU LOVE AS A CHILD?
THE BORROWERS
THE BORROWERS AFIELD
THE BORROWERS AFLOAT
THE BORROWERS ALOFT
THE BORROWERS AVENGED, all by Mary Norton
THE SECRET GARDEN by Frances Hodgson Burnett
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE by CS Lewis
WHAT BOOKS DO YOU LOVE NOW?
THE MAIDEN DINOSAUR
TEA AT FOUR O'CLOCK, both by Janet McNeill
LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER by DH Lawrence
THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE
THE FEAST OF LUPERCAL
AN ANSWER FROM LIMBO
THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY, all by Brian Moore
READING IN THE DARK by Seamus Deane
THE COUNTRY GIRLS TRILOGY by Edna O'Brien
BEATRICE by Noelle Harrison
THE RAGGY BOY TRILOGY -
Raymond Jean
Raymond Jean (1925–2012) wrote more than 40 books during his lifetime – novels, short-story collections and essays. He was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle in 1983. His novella La Lectrice (Reader for Hire) became a cinema hit starring Miou-Miou. The film won the César Award for Best Supporting Actor and was named the best feature at the 1988 Montreal World Film Festival.
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From http://www.peirenepress.com/books/cha... -
Luis Miguel Rocha
So, you want to know more about Luis?
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Well, he was born in Oporto, northern Portugal, in 1976. It was a sunny winter's day of February... at least that's what his mother says...
Luis spent his childhood in Viana do Castelo, a small town north of Oporto.
He devoted himself exclusively to writing while trying to be a citizen of the world.
He was the author of The Last Pope, The Holy Bullet and The Pope's Assassin.
Luis passed away on March 26, 2015. He was 39. -
Tracy Chevalier
Born:
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19 October 1962 in Washington, DC. Youngest of 3 children. Father was a photographer for The Washington Post.
Childhood:
Nerdy. Spent a lot of time lying on my bed reading. Favorite authors back then: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madeleine L’Engle, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander. Book I would have taken to a desert island: Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery.
Education:
BA in English, Oberlin College, Ohio, 1984. No one was surprised that I went there; I was made for such a progressive, liberal place.
MA in creative writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, 1994. There’s a lot of debate about whether or not you can be taught to write. Why doesn’t anyone ask that of professional singers, painters, d -
Rose Tremain
Dame Rose Tremain is an acclaimed English novelist and short story writer, celebrated for her distinctive approach to historical fiction and her focus on characters who exist on the margins of society. Educated at the Sorbonne and the University of East Anglia, where she later taught creative writing and served as Chancellor, Tremain has produced a rich body of work spanning novels, short stories, plays, and memoir. Influenced by writers such as William Golding and Gabriel García Márquez, her narratives often blend psychological depth with lyrical prose.
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Among her many honors, she has received the Whitbread Award for Music and Silence, the Orange Prize for The Road Home, and the National Jewish Book Award for The Gustav Sonata. She was sho -
John Boyne
I was born in Dublin, Ireland, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by UEA.
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I’ve published 14 novels for adults, 6 novels for younger readers, and a short story collection. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas was a New York Times no.1 Bestseller and was adapted for a feature film, a play, a ballet and an opera, selling around 11 million copies worldwide.
Among my most popular books are The Heart’s Invisible Furies, A Ladder to the Sky and My Brother’s Name is Jessica.
I’m also a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times.
In 2012, I was awarded the Hennessy Literary ‘Hall of Fame’ Award for my body of work. I’v -
Shirley Hazzard
Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and as a child travelled the world due to her parents’ diplomatic postings. At age 16, she began working for British Combined Intelligence Services in Hong Kong, monitoring civil war in China. After her family moved to New York City, she worked for several years as a typist at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.
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After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and a passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of several of her nonfiction books.
Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. -
William Boyd
Note: William^^Boyd
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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. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.
At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 and completed a PhD thesis on Shelley. For a brief period he worked at the New Statesman magazine as a TV critic, then he re -
Joanne Harris
Joanne Harris is also known as Joanne M. Harris
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Joanne Harris is an Anglo-French author, whose books include fourteen novels, two cookbooks and many short stories. Her work is extremely diverse, covering aspects of magic realism, suspense, historical fiction, mythology and fantasy. She has also written a DR WHO novella for the BBC, has scripted guest episodes for the game ZOMBIES, RUN!, and is currently engaged in a number of musical theatre projects as well as developing an original drama for television.
In 2000, her 1999 novel CHOCOLAT was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and in 2022 was awarded an OBE by the Queen.
Her hobbies are listed in Who' -
Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and she has been a critically acclaimed international bestselling author ever since.
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She is the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the critically acclaimed novels Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird, Case Histories, and One Good Turn.
Case Histories introduced her readers to Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, and won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.
When Will There Be Good News? was voted Richard & Judy Book Best Read of the Year. After Case Histories and One Good Turn, it was her third novel to fea -
Jan Morris
Jan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture.
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In 1949 Jan Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. Morris and Tuckniss had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she -
Donna Leon
Donna Leon (born September 29, 1942, in Montclair, New Jersey) is an American author of a series of crime novels set in Venice and featuring the fictional hero Commissario Guido Brunetti.
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Donna Leon has lived in Venice for over twenty-five years. She has worked as a lecturer in English Literature for the University of Maryland University College - Europe (UMUC-Europe) in Italy, then as a Professor from 1981 to 1999 at the american military base of Vicenza (Italy) and a writer.
Her crime novels are all situated in or near Venice. They are written in English and translated into many foreign languages, although not, by her request, into Italian. Her ninth Brunetti novel, Friends in High Places, won the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger i -
Susan Hill
Susan Hill was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire in 1942. Her hometown was later referred to in her novel A Change for the Better (1969) and some short stories especially "Cockles and Mussels".
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She attended Scarborough Convent School, where she became interested in theatre and literature. Her family left Scarborough in 1958 and moved to Coventry where her father worked in car and aircraft factories. Hill states that she attended a girls’ grammar school, Barr's Hill. Her fellow pupils included Jennifer Page, the first Chief Executive of the Millennium Dome. At Barrs Hill she took A levels in English, French, History and Latin, proceeding to an English degree at King's College London. By this time she had already written her first novel, Th -
Alan Garner
Alan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.
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Born into a working-class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and r -
Barbara Pym
People know British writer Barbara Pym for her comic novels, such as Excellent Women (1952), of English life.
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After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.
The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. A -
Helen Garner
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She has published many works of fiction including Monkey Grip, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Children's Bach. Her fiction has won numerous awards. She is also one of Australia's most respected non-fiction writers, and received a Walkley Award for journalism in 1993.
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Her most recent books are The First Stone, True Stories, My Hard Heart, The Feel of Stone and Joe Cinque's Consolation. In 2006 she won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. She lives in Melbourne.
Praise for Helen Garner's work
'Helen Garner is an extraordinarily good writer. There is not a paragraph, let alone a page, where she does not compel your attention.'
Bulletin
'She is outstanding in the accuracy of her observations, the intensity of passio -
Clare Chambers
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 than her. She read English at Oxford. The marriage moved to New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel. She now lives in Kent with her husband and young family. In 1999, her novel Learning to Swim won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.
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Alan Johnson
Alan Arthur Johnson (born 17 May 1950) is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for the Home Department from 2009 to 2010 and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2011. A member of the Labour Party, Johnson served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Hull West and Hessle from 1997 to 2017.
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Jane Caro
Jane Caro wears many hats; including author, lecturer, mentor, social commentator, columnist, workshop facilitator, speaker, broadcaster and award-winning advertising writer. Jane runs her own communications consultancy and lectures in Advertising Creative at The School of Communication Arts at UWS. She has published three books: The Stupid Country: How Australia is dismantling public education co-authored with Chris Bonnor (2007), The F Word. How we learned to swear by feminism co-authored with Catherine Fox (2008), and Just a Girl (UQP, 2011). She has also appeared on Channel 7’s Sunrise, ABC’s Q&A and ABC’s The Gruen Transfer.
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Anna Hope
Anna Hope is an English writer and actress from Manchester. She is perhaps best known for her Doctor Who role of Novice Hame. She was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, and Birkbeck College, London.
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Anna's powerful first novel, WAKE, sold to Transworld Publishers in a seven-way auction. Set over the course of five days in 1920, WAKE weaves the stories of three women around the journey of the Unknown Soldier, from its excavation in Northern France to Armistice Day at Westminster Abbey. US rights were pre-empted by Susan Kamil at Random House. The book will be published in Doubleday hardback in early 2014.
- excerpted from Wikipedia and Felicity Bryan Associates Literary Agency -
Claire Fuller
Claire Fuller is the author of six novels: The Memory of Animals; Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award 2021, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction; Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the 2015 Desmond Elliott prize; Swimming Lessons, shortlisted for the Encore Prize; Bitter Orange longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award; and forthcoming in May 2026 Hunger and Thirst.
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Benjamin Wood
Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in Merseyside. He is the author of five novels, the latest of which, SEASCRAPER, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. His first book won France's Prix du Roman Fnac and Prix Baudelaire in 2014. His other works have been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Costa First Novel Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award, the European Union Prize for Literature, the Commonwealth Book Award, and the RSL Encore Award. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King's College London, where he teaches fiction modules and founded the PhD in Creative Writing programme. He lives in Surrey with his wife and sons.
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Sarah Winman
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 Year in the Galaxy National Book Awards.
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A.S. Patric
A. S. Patric is an award winning writer and author of Black Rock White City, listed as one of the best novels of 2015 by The Australian and The Australian Book Review. It has been highly commended by the judges of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2016. He is also the author of Las Vegas for Vegans, a story collection shortlisted in the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards. His debut book is The Rattler & other stories, shortlisted for the Lord Mayor’s Award. He is also the author of Bruno Kramzer, a novella shortlisted for the Viva La Novella Prize. He is the winner of the Ned Kelly Award and the Booranga Prize. His stories have featured in The Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Overland, Southerly, Island, Quadrant, in over 20 other literar
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Donal Ryan
Donal Ryan is the author of the novels The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December, the short-story collection A Slanting of the Sun, and the forthcoming novel All We Shall Know. He holds a degree in Law from the University of Limerick, and worked for the National Employment Rights Authority before the success of his first two novels allowed him to pursue writing as a full-time career.
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Benjamin Myers
Benjamin Myers was born in Durham, UK, in 1976.
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He is an award-winning author and journalist whose recent novel Cuddy (2023) won the Goldsmiths Prize.
His first short story collection, Male Tears, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.
His novel The Offing was published by Bloomsbury in 2019 and is a best-seller in Germany. It was serialised by Radio 4's Book At Bedtime and Radio 2 Book club choice. It is being developed for stage and has been optioned for film.
The non-fiction book Under The Rock, was shortlisted for The Portico Prize For Literature in 2020.
Recipient of the Roger Deakin Award and first published by Bluemoose Books, Myers' novel The Gallows Pole was published to acclaim in 2017 and was winner of the Walter Scott Prize 2018 - the -
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Eleanor Ray
Eleanor Ray has an MA in English Literature from Edinburgh University. She lives in London with her husband and three young children.
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Eleanor was inspired to write Everything is Beautiful (also known as The Missing Treasures of Amy Ashton in the US) by the objects her toddler collects and treasures – twigs, empty water bottles and wilting daisies.
The Art of Belonging is her second novel and was written in lock down. It is about the messy, complicated and wonderful things that can happen when families are together. -
Natasha Solomons
Natasha Solomons is a writer and the New York Times bestselling author of The Gallery of Vanished Husbands, The House at Tyneford, and Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English. She lives in Dorset England, with her husband, the writer David Solomons, and their two young children. Song of Hartgrove Hall is her fourth novel.
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Dan Snow
Daniel Robert Snow MBE is an English popular historian and television presenter.
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