Alexander Baron
Arguably the finest British novelist of the Second World War, Alexander Baron (1917–99) enlisted in the army in 1939. His experience fighting in Sicily and at the D-day landings informed his bestselling novels.
Simon Bill
Closely associated with the YBA group of visual artists, Simon Bill has had solo exhibitions in California, Cologne, London, Manchester and a major retrospective at Baltic, Gateshead. Artist in Residence is his first work of fiction.
Peter Blegvad
Peter Blegvad is a polymath – a writer, cartoonist, and musician. He was a founding member of the avant-pop band Slapp Happy and has played and recorded with Faust, The Golden Palominos, and others.
Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles was born in Queens, New York, in 1910. He began his travels as a teenager, setting off for Paris. In 1930 he visited Morocco for the first time, with Aaron Copland, with whom he was studying music.
Jonathan Buckley
Born in Birmingham, Jonathan Buckley grew up in Dudley and studied English Literature at Sussex University. He was commissioned in 1987 to write the Rough Guide to Venice & the Veneto.
Tom Bullough
Tom Bullough is the author of three novels including A and The Claude Glass, both published by Sort Of Books. Born in 1975, he spent most of his childhood on a hill farm in Radnorshire.
Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) was the second child of Anglo-Irish Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Her pioneering regional novels set in Ireland and sparkling comedies of English manners commanded unprecedented advances.
Sophie Hannah
Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling writer of psychological crime fiction, published in 35 languages. In 2014 she was commissioned to write a new Hercule Poirot mystery novel.
Kathleen Jamie
Born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her poetry collection The Overhaul won the Costa Prize for Poetry in 2012; The Tree House won both the Forward Prize and Scottish Book of the Year Award.
Tove Jansson
The writer and artist Tove Jansson (1914–2001) is best known as the creator of the Moomin stories, first published in English sixty years ago and remaining in print ever since.
Shehan Karunatilaka
Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author of Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, his second novel, won the 2022 Booker Prize.
Michelle de Kretser
Born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia as a teenager. Her novel Scary Monsters won the 2023 Rathbone Folio Prize. She has also won the Miles Franklin Award twice.
Robert Kunzig
Robert Kunzig is a multiple award-winning science writer. His book Mapping the Deep won the Aventis Science Book of the Year award. He is currently environment editor at National Geographic.
Simon Lewis
Simon Lewis was born in Wales in 1971. He works as a screenwriter for Potboiler Films, Cloud 8 and Channel 4, and as a travel writer for Rough Guides, as well as writing novels.
Ulla-Lena Lundberg
An acclaimed and prize-winning Finland-Swedish novelist and ethnologist. She has published more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction. Born in Kökar in the Åland Islands.
Stephen Marche
Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist, author of half a dozen books. He has written opinion pieces for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Vanity Fair.
Kyoko Nakajima
Kyoko Nakajima is a multi-award-winning author of novels and short stories. She was awarded the prestigious Naoki Prize for her novel The Little House, which was made into a film.
Christopher Nye
Born and raised in West Sussex. His career ranged from sculpting celery on a Caribbean cruise ship to running the crêpe stand on Brighton pier, before bringing his unique Diner cuisine to small town Britain.
Lore Segal
Born in Vienna in 1928, Lore Segal escaped to England aged ten on the Kindertransport. She has been writing stories for the New Yorker since 1958. Aged 95, she was elected to the US Academy of Arts and Letters.
Chris Stewart
Chris Stewart shot to fame with Driving Over Lemons in 1999. Funny, insightful and real, the book told the story of how he bought a peasant farm in a remote valley in Andalucía.
Carl Frode Tiller
Born in 1970 in Namsos, Norway. One of the most acclaimed Scandinavian authors of his generation, Tiller has received the EU Prize for Literature and Nordic Critics Prize.
Jasper Winn
Jasper Winn grew up in West Cork, where he left school at age ten and educated himself by reading, riding horses, learning rural skills and playing music. He was story consultant on Ride Around the World.
Boel Westin
Professor of Literature at the University of Stockholm. She has published works on Lewis Carroll, August Strindberg, and has recently edited the Collected Letters of Tove Jansson.
Gabriel Zaid
Gabriel Zaid lives in Mexico City with the artist Basia Batorska, her paintings, three cats, and ten thousand books.
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. The most widely translated writer of the 1920s and 1930s, he was closely identified with the humanitarian values of pre-war Vienna.