John Kingsley Orton, known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist.
Margaret Forster was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, historian and critic, best known for the 1965 novel Georgy Girl, made into a successful film of the same name, which inspired a hit song by The Seekers. Other successes were a 2003 novel, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, biographies of Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her memoirs Hidden Lives and Precious Lives.
Sir Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd is an English biographer.
Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing.
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.
John Alexander Guy is a British historian and biographer.
John Henry Lahr is an American theater critic and writer. From 1992 to 2013, he was a staff writer and the senior drama critic at The New Yorker. He has written more than twenty books related to theater. Lahr has been called "one of the greatest biographers writing today".
Simon Phillips Norton was a mathematician in Cambridge, England, who worked on finite simple groups.
Will Adamsdale is an English actor, comedian and writer. In 2004, he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for his show Jackson's Way.
Street Trash is a 1987 American black comedy body horror film directed by J. Michael Muro. It won the Silver Raven at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film. The film has acquired a status as a cult classic independent horror-comedy and is one of a number of films known as "melt movies".
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment in the Department of English in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Sustainability in the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.
William Andrew Coulthard Robinson is a British author and former newspaper editor.
The Costa Book Awards were a set of annual literary awards recognising English-language books by writers based in UK and Ireland. Originally named the Whitbread Book Awards from 1971 to 2005 after its first sponsor, the Whitbread company, then a brewery and owner of restaurant chains, it was renamed when Costa Coffee, then a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship. The companion Costa Short Story Award was established in 2012. Costa Coffee was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 2018. The awards were abruptly terminated in 2022.
Kathryn Lasky is an American children's writer who also writes for adults under the names Kathryn Lasky Knight and E. L. Swann. Her children's books include several Dear America books, The Royal Diaries books, Sugaring Time, The Night Journey, Wolves of the Beyond, and the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series. Her awards include Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature, National Jewish Book Award, and Newbery Honor.
Joan Brady was an American-British writer. She was the first woman and American to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for her novel Theory of War.
Simon Frank Garfield is a British journalist and non-fiction author. He has written for publications such as Time Out, The Independent, and The Observer. His early work focused on the music industry, but his books have increasingly delved into niche topics, from British wrestling and the invention of mauve to the history of encyclopedias and typefaces. Garfield is based in London.
Stuart: A Life Backwards is a biography by Alexander Masters of his friend Stuart Clive Shorter, formerly, at various times, a prisoner and a career criminal. It explores how a young boy, somewhat disabled from birth, became mentally unstable, criminal and violent, living homeless on the streets of Cambridge. As the title suggests, the book starts from Shorter's adult life, and works backwards to trace through his troubled childhood, examining the effects his family, schooling and disability had on his eventual state.
Andrew Brown is an English journalist, writer, and editor. He was one of the founding staff members of The Independent, where he worked as a religious correspondent, parliamentary sketch writer, and a feature writer. He has written extensively on technology for Prospect and the New Statesman and been a feature writer on The Guardian. He has worked as the editor for the Belief section of The Guardian's Comment is Free, which won a Webby under his leadership, and is currently a leader writer and member of the paper's editorial board. He is also the press columnist of the Church Times. In The Beginning was the Worm (2004) was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize. Fishing in Utopia (2008) won the Orwell Prize and was nominated for the Dolman Best Travel Book Award in 2009.
Alexander Bellos is a British writer, broadcaster and mathematics communicator. He is the author of books about Brazil and mathematics, as well as having a column in The Guardian newspaper.
David Hamilton Stouck is a Canadian literary critic and biographer, formerly Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.
