De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) is a public university in the city of Leicester, England. It was established in accordance with the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992 as a degree awarding body. The name De Montfort University was taken from Simon de Montfort, a 13th-century Earl of Leicester.
Jane Draycott FRSL is a British poet, artistic collaborator and poetry translator. She was born in London in 1954 and studied at King's College London and the University of Bristol. Draycott's fifth collection The Kingdom was published in 2023 by Carcanet Press.
Madeleine Edith Prior MBE is an English folk rock singer, best known as the lead vocalist of Steeleye Span. She was born in Blackpool and moved to St Albans in her teens. Her father, Allan Prior, was co-creator of the police drama Z-Cars. She was married to Steeleye bass guitarist Rick Kemp, and their daughter, Rose Kemp, is also a singer. Their son, Alex Kemp, is also a guitarist and has deputised for his father playing bass guitar for Steeleye Span.
Jean "Binta" Breeze MBE was a Jamaican dub poet and storyteller, acknowledged as the first woman to write and perform dub poetry. She worked also as a theatre director, choreographer, actor, and teacher. She performed her work around the world, in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, South-East Asia, and Africa, and has been called "one of the most important, influential performance poets of recent years".
Susan Lorraine Cook is a British television presenter and author. With Nick Ross, she co-presented the BBC One factual crime show Crimewatch from 1984 until 1995.
Jacqueline Margaret Kay, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Joan Maureen "Biddy" Baxter, MBE is a British television producer, best known for editing the long-running BBC TV children's magazine show Blue Peter from 1962 to 1988. As editor of the programme, Baxter devised much of the format that is still used today.
Alison Louise Balsom, Lady Mendes, is an English trumpet soloist, arranger, producer, and music educator. Balsom was awarded Artist of the Year at the 2013 Gramophone Awards and has won three Classic BRIT Awards and three German Echo Awards, and was a soloist at the BBC Last Night of the Proms in 2009. She was the artistic director of the 2019 Cheltenham Music Festival.
Nicola Joy Nadia Benedetti is an Italian-Scottish classical solo violinist and festival director. Her ability was recognised when she was a child, including the award of BBC Young Musician of the Year when she was 16. She works with orchestras in Europe and America as well as with Alexei Grynyuk, her regular pianist. Since 2012, she has played the Gariel Stradivarius violin.
Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or Miss Lou, was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican Patois or Creole, Bennett worked to preserve the practice of presenting poetry, folk songs and stories in patois, establishing the validity of local languages for literary expression.
Lakshmi Holmström MBE was an Indian-British writer, literary critic, and translator of Tamil fiction into English. Her most prominent works were her translations of short stories and novels by contemporary writers in Tamil, such as Mauni, Pudhumaipithan, Ashoka Mitran, Sundara Ramasami, C. S. Lakshmi, Bama, and Imayam.
Louise Emma Joseph, known professionally as Dreda Say Mitchell, is a British novelist, broadcaster, journalist and campaigner. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2020 for her services to literature and educational work in prison.
John Siddique is a spiritual teacher, poet, and author.
Anna Howard Meredith is a Scottish composer and performer of electronic and acoustic music. She is a former composer-in-residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and former PRS/RPS Composer in the House with Sinfonia ViVA.
Patricia Cumper, MBE, FRSA, FRSL, also known as Pat Cumper, is a British playwright, producer, director, theatre administrator, critic and commentator. She was the artistic director and CEO of Talawa Theatre Company from 2006 to 2012, and she has adapted novels for radio and television, including books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Andrea Levy, Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou and others.
A statue of suffragette Alice Hawkins is located in Green Dragon Square, Leicester, United Kingdom.
Irenosen Iseghohi Okojie FRSL is a Nigerian-born novelist and short-story writer working in London, England. Her stories incorporate speculative elements and also make use of her West African heritage. Her first novel, Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask Award in 2016, and her story "Grace Jones" won the 2020 Caine Prize for African Writing. Okojie was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in 2018, and in 2020 was appointed a vice-chair of the RSL.
Kerry Young is a British writer, born in Jamaica. She is the author of three well received and interlinked novels: Pao (2011), Gloria (2013) and Show Me a Mountain (2016).
Maya Youssef is a Syrian musician and composer based in the United Kingdom who plays the qanun. She has performed on the BBC Proms and WOMAD.
Owen Leeming is a New Zealand poet, playwright, radio presenter and television producer. While working in broadcasting in London and New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s, he had short stories and poems published in various magazines and journals, and wrote stage and radio plays. In 1970 he was the first recipient of one of New Zealand's foremost literary awards, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, after which he published his first collection of poetry.
