Morgan Freeman is an American actor, director, and narrator. Noted for his distinctive deep voice, Freeman is known for his various roles in a wide variety of film genres. Throughout his career spanning over five decades, he has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
Coldplay are a British rock band formed in London in 1996. The band consists of vocalist, rhythm guitarist, and pianist Chris Martin; lead guitarist Jonny Buckland; bassist Guy Berryman; drummer Will Champion; and creative director Phil Harvey. They met at University College London and began playing music together from 1996 to 1998, first calling themselves Pectoralz and then Starfish.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short story writer.
Willard Tobe Hooper was an American director, screenwriter, and producer best known for his work in the horror genre. The British Film Institute cited Hooper as one of the most influential horror filmmakers of all time.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998) is a best-selling popular history book by Adam Hochschild that explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, as well as the large-scale atrocities committed during that period. The book, also a general biography of the private life of Leopold, succeeded in increasing public awareness of these crimes in recent decades.
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer and the winner of the 54th Jnanpith award, India’s highest literary honor, best known for his work in English fiction. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and Southeast Asia.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the debut novel by British writer Susanna Clarke. Published in 2004, it is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes/stereotypes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel. It inverts the Industrial Revolution conception of the North–South divide in England: in this book the North is romantic and magical, rather than rational and concrete.
Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist known for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular history. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and a former columnist for the London Evening Standard. He has been an occasional contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.
Steven Berlin Johnson is an American popular science author and media theorist.
Noel Anthony Clarke is a British actor, screenwriter, director and comic book writer. Rising to prominence for playing Mickey Smith in Doctor Who (2005–2010), he played Sam in the films Kidulthood (2006), Adulthood (2008) and Brotherhood (2016), which he also wrote and directed. He played Aaron Bishop in the TV series Bulletproof (2018–2021), which he also wrote and produced.
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, is a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Mantel has twice been awarded the Booker Prize, the first time for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and secondly for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of the Cromwell trilogy. Mantel was the fourth person and first woman to receive the award twice, following in the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell. The third instalment of the trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was released on 5 March 2020 in the UK and the following July was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was an English science-fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.
James Cameron is a Canadian director, screenwriter, and producer who has had an extensive career in film and television. Cameron's debut was the 1978 science fiction short Xenogenesis, which he directed, wrote and produced. In the early part of his career, he did various technical jobs such as special visual effects producer, set dresser assistant, matte artist, and photographer. His feature directorial debut was the 1982 release Piranha II: The Spawning. The next film he directed was the science fiction action thriller The Terminator (1984). It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular cyborg assassin, and was Cameron's breakthrough feature. In 1986, he directed and wrote the science fiction action sequel Aliens starring Sigourney Weaver. He followed this by directing another science fiction film The Abyss (1989). In 1991, Cameron directed the sequel to The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and also executive produced the action crime film Point Break. Three years later he directed a third Schwarzenegger-starring action film True Lies (1994).
Variety is an American media company owned by Penske Media Corporation. The company was founded by Sime Silverman in New York City in 1905 as a weekly newspaper reporting on theater and vaudeville. In 1933 it added Daily Variety, based in Los Angeles, to cover the motion-picture industry. Variety.com features breaking entertainment news, reviews, box office results, cover stories, videos, photo galleries and features, plus a credits database, production charts and calendar, with archive content dating back to 1905.
Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller.
Nicolas Cage is an American actor and producer who began his career in 1981 with a role in the television pilot The Best of Times. The following year, he made his feature film acting debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the second and last time he was credited by his birth name as Nicolas Coppola before changing his name professionally to avoid nepotism allegations due to his connection to the Coppola family. In 1983, Cage was cast in a leading role in the teen romantic comedy Valley Girl alongside Deborah Foreman; the film was praised by critics and summarized by Rotten Tomatoes as a "goofy yet amiable film" with "engaging performances from its two leads."
Scarlett Johansson is an American actress who has appeared in films, television series, video games and stage plays. Johansson made her debut in the 1994 comedy-drama North. Her first lead role was as the 11-year-old sister of a pregnant teenager in Manny & Lo (1996), for which she received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. Johansson starred in Robert Redford's drama The Horse Whisperer (1998), and appeared with Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi in the black comedy Ghost World (2001). Two years later, Johansson played a woman in her 20s stuck in a listless marriage who befriends an aging American actor in Japan in the Sofia Coppola-directed Lost in Translation, and also played a servant in Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer's household in Girl with a Pearl Earring with Colin Firth. She was nominated at the 61st Golden Globe Awards for both films, and received the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for the former.
Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian writer. He is best known for writing the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize in their respective years of publication. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages.
Piranesi is a fantasy novel by English author Susanna Clarke, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2020. It is Clarke's second novel, following her debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), published sixteen years earlier. Piranesi won the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.
