Joe Randolph Ackerley was a British writer and editor. Starting with the BBC the year after its founding in 1927, he was promoted to literary editor of The Listener, its weekly magazine, where he served for more than two decades. He published many emerging poets and writers who became influential in Great Britain. He was openly homosexual, a rarity in his time when homosexual activity was forbidden by law and socially ostracised.
The TLSAckerley Prize is awarded annually to a literary autobiography of excellence, written by an author of British nationality and published during the preceding year. The winner receives £4,000.
Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Sir Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd is an English biographer.
Chatto & Windus is an imprint of Penguin Random House that was formerly an independent book publishing company founded in London in 1855 by John Camden Hotten. Following Hotten's death, the firm would reorganize under the names of his business partner Andrew Chatto and poet William Edward Windus. The company was purchased by Random House in 1987 and is now a sub-imprint of Vintage Books within the Penguin UK division.
Richard Thomas Mabey is a writer and broadcaster, chiefly on the relations between nature and culture.
Lindsey Hilsum is an English television journalist and writer. She is the International Editor for Channel 4 News, and has reported from six continents, including coverage of the major conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda and Ukraine in the past two decades. She is also a regular contributor to The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, New Statesman, and Granta. Hilsum is author of the books Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution (2012) and In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin (2018). She is the recipient of several awards, among which are the Patron's Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 2017, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the biography category for In Extremis.
Dame Susan Elizabeth Hill, Lady Wells is an English author of fiction and non-fiction works. Her novels include The Woman in Black, which has been adapted for stage and screen, The Mist in the Mirror, and I'm the King of the Castle, for which she received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971. She also won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1972 for The Bird of Night, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Laurence Lerner, often called Larry, was a South African-born British literary critic, poet, novelist, and lecturer, recognized for his achievement with his election to The Royal Society of Literature.
Angelica Vanessa Garnett, was a British writer, painter and artist. She was the author of the memoir Deceived with Kindness (1984), an account of her experience growing up at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.
Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican and American novelist and writer. Her novel Book of Clouds (2009) was published in eight countries, and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger. Her second novel, Asunder was published in 2013 to unanimous acclaim. Her third novel, Sea Monsters (2019), was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2020. She is the eldest daughter of Mexican poet and diplomat Homero Aridjis and American Betty F. de Aridjis, an environmental activist and translator. She is the sister of film maker Eva Aridjis. She has a doctorate in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from the University of Oxford.
Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL is a contemporary Irish poet and academic.
Diana Athill was a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the greatest writers of the 20th century at the London-based publishing company Andre Deutsch Ltd.
P. J. Kavanagh FRSL was an English poet, lecturer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. His father was the ITMA scriptwriter Ted Kavanagh.
Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-born British author, filmmaker and academic. Her writing and films explore migration, alienation, memory, personal journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities.
Horatio Clare is a Welsh author known for travel, memoir, nature and children's books, and his writing and broadcasting on mental health and psychiatry. He worked at the BBC as a producer on Front Row, Night Waves and The Verb. He is a senior lecturer in creative non-fiction at the University of Manchester.
John Fuller FRSL is an English poet and author, and Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford.
And When Did You Last See Your Father? is a 2007 British drama film directed by Anand Tucker. The screenplay by David Nicholls is based on the 1993 memoir of the same title by Blake Morrison.
Laura Cumming is a British journalist who is the art critic of The Observer newspaper, a position she has held since 1999. Before that she worked for The Guardian, the New Statesman and the BBC. 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. The Vanishing Man was a New York Times bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2016.
