Winifred Holtby
Winifred Holtby was a committed socialist and feminist who wrote the classic South Riding as a warm yet sharp social critique of the well-to-do farming community she was born into.
She was a good friend of Vera Brittain, possibly portraying her as Delia in The Crowded Street.
She died at the age of 37.
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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 -
Joanna Miller
Joanna was born and raised in Cambridge, UK. She studied English at Oxford and later returned to the University to train as a teacher.
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After ten years in education, she set up an award-winning poetry gift business. During this time, she wrote thousands of poems to order and her rhyming verse was filmed by the BBC.
Unable to resist the lure of the classroom, Joanna recently returned to Oxford University to study creative writing. She will be a writer in residence at Gladstone's Library in 2025.
When Joanna isn’t writing she is either walking her dog, providing a taxi service for her teenagers, or working in the local bookshop. She lives with her family near the Grand Union Canal in Hertfordshire, UK.
The Eights is her first novel. -
Janice Hallett
Janice Hallett is a former magazine editor, award-winning journalist, and government communications writer. She wrote articles and speeches for, among others, the Cabinet Office, Home Office, and Department for International Development. Her enthusiasm for travel has taken her around the world several times, from Madagascar to the Galapagos, Guatemala to Zimbabwe, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. A playwright and screenwriter, she penned the feminist Shakespearean stage comedy NetherBard and cowrote the feature film Retreat. The Appeal is her first novel.
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Richard Coles
The Reverend Richard Coles (born 26 March 1962) is a Church of England priest, broadcaster, writer and musician. Richard Coles was born in Northampton, England and educated at the independent Wellingborough School (where he was a choirboy)and at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education, Department of Drama and the Liberal Arts. He is known for having been the multi-instrumentalist who partnered Jimmy Somerville in the 1980s band The Communards, which achieved three Top Ten hits. He later attended King's College London where he studied theology from 1990. Richard Coles co-presents Saturday Live on BBCR4. In January 2011 The Reverend Richard Coles was appointed as the parish priest of St Mary the Virgin, Finedon in the Diocese of P
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E.H. Young
Born Emily Hilda Young.
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Although almost completely forgotten by recent generations, E. H. Young was a best-selling novelist of her time. She was born the daughter of a shipbroker and attended Gateshead Secondary School (a higher grade school later renamed Gateshead Grammar School) and Penrhos College, Colwyn Bay, Wales. In 1902, at the age of 22, she married Arthur Daniell, a solicitor from Bristol, and moved with him to the upscale neighbourhood of Clifton.
Here, Young developed an interest in classical and modern philosophy. She became a supporter of the suffragette movement, and started publishing novels. She also began a lifelong affair with Ralph Henderson, a schoolteacher and a friend of her husband.
When the First World War broke out in -
Noel Streatfeild
Mary Noel Streatfeild, known as Noel Streatfeild, was an author best known and loved for her children's books, including Ballet Shoes and Circus Shoes. She also wrote romances under the pseudonym Susan Scarlett .
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She was born on Christmas Eve, 1895, the daughter of William Champion Streatfeild and Janet Venn and the second of six children to be born to the couple. Sister Ruth was the oldest, after Noel came Barbara, William ('Bill'), Joyce (who died of TB prior to her second birthday) and Richenda. Ruth and Noel attended Hastings and St. Leonard's Ladies' College in 1910. As an adult, she began theater work, and spent approximately 10 years in the theater.
During the Great War, in 1915 Noel worked first as a volunteer in a soldier's hospi -
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.
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AKA:
Елізабет Гаскелл (Ukrainian) -
Antoine Laurain
Antoine Laurain (born 1972) is a French author. He previously worked as a screenwriter and antiques dealer.
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His first novel "The Portrait" was published in 2007 and he achieved wide international acclaim with "The Red Notebook". Since then his works have been translated into 14 languages and partly made into films. -
Laura Cumming
Laura Cumming (born July 1961) the art critic for The Observer. In addition to her career in journalism, Cumming has written well-received books on self-portraits in art and the discovery of a lost portrait by Diego Velázquez in 1845.
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Ben Aaronovitch
Ben Aaronovitch's career started with a bang writing for Doctor Who, subsided in the middle and then, as is traditional, a third act resurgence with the bestselling Rivers of London series.
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Born and raised in London he says that he'll leave his home when they prise his city out of his cold dead fingers. -
Barbara Comyns
Barbara Comyns was educated mainly by governesses until she went to art schools in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Her father was a semi-retired managing director of a Midland chemical firm. She was one of six children and they lived in a house on the banks of the Avon in Warwickshire. She started writing fiction at the age of ten and her first novel, Sisters by a River, was published in 1947. She also worked in an advertising agency, a typewriting bureau, dealt in old cars and antique furniture, bred poodles, converted and let flats, and exhibited pictures in The London Group. She first married in 1931, to an artist, and for the second time in 1945. With her second husband she lived in Spain for eighteen years.
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Dorothy Whipple
Born in 1893, DOROTHY WHIPPLE (nee Stirrup) had an intensely happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, for three years she worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham; here she wrote Young Anne (1927), the first of nine extremely successful novels which included Greenbanks (1932) and The Priory (1939). Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight (1934) and They were Sisters (1943), were made into films. She also wrote short storie
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Susie Dent
Dent was educated at the Marist Convent in Ascot, an independent Roman Catholic day school. She went on to Somerville College, Oxford for her B.A. in modern languages, then to Princeton University for her master's degree in German.
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Dent is serves as the resident lexicographer and adjudicator for the letters rounds on long-running British game show Countdown. At the time she began work on Countdown in 1992, she had just started working for the Oxford University Press on producing English dictionaries, having previously worked on bilingual dictionaries. -
Jayne Anne Phillips
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, and Quiet Dell. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Winner of an Arts and Letters Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2018. A National Book Award finalist, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she lives in New York and Boston.
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Vera Brittain
Vera Mary Brittain was an English writer and pacifist, best remembered as the author of the best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth, recounting her experiences during World War I and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
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Her daughter is Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby, who is a British politician and academic who represents the Liberal Democrats. -
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie also wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and was occasionally published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan.
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen -
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Elizabeth Jane Howard, CBE, was an English novelist. She was an actress and a model before becoming a novelist. In 1951, she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her first novel, The Beautiful Visit. Six further novels followed, before she embarked on her best known work, a four novel family saga (i.e., The Cazalet Chronicles) set in wartime Britain. The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off were serialised by Cinema Verity for BBC television as The Cazalets (The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion and Casting Off). She has also written a book of short stories, Mr Wrong, and edited two anthologies.
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Her last novel in The Cazalet Chronicles series, "ALL CHANGE", was published in November 2013. -
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 -
Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson was born and died in Helsinki, Finland. As a Finnish citizen whose mother tongue was Swedish, she was part of the Swedish-speaking Finns minority. Thus, all her books were originally written in Swedish.
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Although known first and foremost as an author, Tove Jansson considered her careers as author and painter to be of equal importance.
Tove Jansson wrote and illustrated her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), during World War II. She said later that the war had depressed her, and she had wanted to write something naive and innocent. Besides the Moomin novels and short stories, Tove Jansson also wrote and illustrated four original and highly popular picture books.
Jansson's Moomin books have been translated in -
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.
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She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced h -
Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire; he also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues and conflicts of his day.
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Trollope has always been a popular novelist. Noted fans have included Sir Alec Guinness (who never travelled without a Trollope novel), former British Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Sir John Major, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, American novelists Sue Grafton and Dominick Dunne and soap opera writer Harding Lemay. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, b -
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".
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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 -
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 -
Henry James
Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
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He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in -
Vera Brittain
Vera Mary Brittain was an English writer and pacifist, best remembered as the author of the best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth, recounting her experiences during World War I and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
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Her daughter is Shirley Vivian Teresa Brittain Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby, who is a British politician and academic who represents the Liberal Democrats. -
Walter Greenwood
Greenwood was born in Hanky Park, in Pendleton, Salford, Lancashire, the son of radical working class parents. His father died when he was nine, and his mother supported him by working as a waitress. Like many children he left school at the age of 13 to work (as a pawnbroker's clerk). He took a succession of low paid jobs, and continued to educate himself in Salford Public Library. During periods of unemployment he worked for the local Labour Party and began to write short stories.
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While unemployed, he wrote his first novel, Love on the Dole, in 1932. It was about the destructive social effects of poverty in his home town. After several rejections, it was published in 1933. It was a critical and commercial success, and a huge influence on th -
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 -
Nina Bawden
Nina Bawden was a popular British novelist and children's writer. Her mother was a teacher and her father a marine.
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When World War II broke out she spent the school holidays at a farm in Shropshire along with her mother and her brothers, but lived in Aberdare, Wales, during term time.
Bawden attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Her novels include Carrie's War, Peppermint Pig, and The Witch's Daughter.
A number of her works have been dramatised by BBC Children's television, and many have been translated into various languages. In 2002 she was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash, and her husband Austen Kark was killed.
Bawden passed away at her home in London on 22 August 20 -
Ethel Wilson
Ethel Davis Wilson was a Canadian writer of short stories and novels.
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Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, she moved to England in 1890 following the death of her mother. In 1898, after the death of her father, she was taken to live with her maternal grandmother in Vancouver, British Columbia. She received her teacher's certificate in 1907, and for thirteen years taught in Vancouver elementary schools.
In 1921 she married Wallace Wilson, President of the Canadian Medical Association and professor of medical ethics at the University of British Columbia.
Wilson is well known as one of the first Canadian writers to truly capture the beauty of British Colombia. She wrote often of places in BC that were important to her and was able to detail the -
Rosalind Murray
Rosalind Murray (1890-1967) was the daughter of the well-known classical scholar Gilbert Murray and Lady Mary Howard. Brought up in Glasgow and Oxford, she was educated by governesses and at the progressive Priors Field School. She published her first novel, The Leading Note, in 1910 when she was 20, her second, Moonseed, in 1911 and her third, Unstable Ways, in 1914; this was the year after her marriage to the historian Arnold Toynbee, with whom she had three sons between 1914 and 1922. The Happy Tree came out in 1926; it was followed by another novel, Hard Liberty, and by a children’s history book. During the 1930s Rosalind Murray’s interests turned to theology; although brought up agnostic, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church
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Laura Talbot
Laura Talbot was the pen name of Lady Ursula Winifred Chetwynd-Talbot, who was known as ‘La’ to her friends.
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Born in 1907, to Viscount Charles Chetwynd-Talbot and his wife Winifred, La was married four times. In 1930, she became the wife of Hector Stewart, and in 1942, of Lieutenant Michael Burton Stewart.
In 1954, La married Patrick Hamilton, with whom she had been having an affair, and finally, Dr. William James in December 1964.
She and her last husband were tragically killed in an air accident in August 1966. -
Helen Zenna Smith
Pseudonym used by the Australian-British author Evadne Price.
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Eva Grace Price was born on 28 August 1888 in Merewether, New South Wales, Australia, of British descent. Her father, Jonathan Dixon Price, was an Autralian miner. Fiction abounds in the autobiographical details supplied by own Evadne Price. She claimed that she lied about her age, when her father died, and she went on stage to support herself and to travel alone to England. She said that she was born on 1896 at sea, on an ocean liner during a travel to Australia, or later that she was born on 1901 in Sussex, England.
On 28 August 1909 in Sydney, she married Henry A. Dabelstein, a German-born actor. After moved to England to acting, she decided reinventing herself, changing her nam -
Avery Corman
Avery Corman (born November 28, 1935, in the Bronx, New York) is an American novelist.
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He is the author of the novel Kramer vs. Kramer (1977) which created a sea change in attitudes toward child custody with the public and in the courts in the United States and internationally. Robert Benton wrote the screenplay and directed the movie of the same name Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. It won 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screen Play. A previous Corman novel, Oh, God! (1971) was the basis for the movie comedy Oh, God!, screenplay by Larry Gelbart, starring George Burns and John Denver. His other novels include The Old Neighborhood (1980), 50 (1987), Prized Possessions (1991), The Big