Caroline Sanderson is a British non-fiction author and books journalist.
Since 2000 she has written non-fiction previews for The Bookseller , where she is associate editor. [1] [2] She has published books about Adele, Jane Austen and children's games, and a children's book about Greece. She hosts the Authors' Matters podcast for the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society. [1]
In 2015-2017 she held a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Worcester. [3] She has contributed In 2022 she was chair of the judges for the Baillie Gifford Prize. [4]
Sanderson has a BA in French language and literature from the Durham University, St John's College. [5]
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her use of biting irony, along with her realism and social commentary, have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
Pride and Prejudice is an 1813 novel of manners by Jane Austen. The novel follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness.
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English. The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Mary Louise Poovey is an American cultural historian and literary critic whose work focuses on the Victorian Era. She is currently Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University, and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge. Poovey has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Swarthmore College, and Yale University.
Hallie Rubenhold is a British historian and author. Her work specializes in 18th and 19th century social history and women's history. Her 2019 book The Five, about the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction. Rubenhold's focus on the victims of murder, rather than on the identity or the acts of the perpetrator, has been credited with changing attitudes to the proper commemoration of such crimes and to the appeal and function of the true crime genre.
Janet Margaret Todd OBE is a British academic and author. She was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare. Much of her work concerns Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and their circles.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
Charlie Jane Anders is an American writer and commentator. She has written several novels, published magazines and websites, and hosted podcasts. In 2005, she received the Lambda Literary Award for work in the transgender category, and in 2009, the Emperor Norton Award. Her 2011 novelette Six Months, Three Days won the 2012 Hugo and was a finalist for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her 2016 novel All the Birds in the Sky was listed No. 5 on Time magazine's "Top 10 Novels" of 2016, won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2017 Crawford Award, and the 2017 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel; it was also a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Adele Parks is an English women's fiction author. She has written 21 novels in her 21-year career as an author and is one of the bestselling authors of women's fiction in the United Kingdom.
Kathleen Freeman was a British classical scholar and author of detective novels. Her detective fiction was published under the pseudonym Mary Fitt. Freeman was a lecturer in Greek at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, between 1919 and 1946.
Julia Lovell is a British scholar and prize-winning author and translator focusing on China.
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.
Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters is a short satirical work by Jane Austen, probably written in May 1816. It was published in complete form for the first time by R. W. Chapman in 1926, extracts having appeared in 1871. It has been said that "in the Plan and the correspondence from which it arose, we have the most important account of what Jane Austen understood to be her aims and capacities as a novelist".
Laura Cumming 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 2017.
Amy Corzine is an American-born fiction and non-fiction writer and poet. Her first book was a Cadogan travel guide to Ireland for families in which she included stories she wrote based on Irish folktales. After that, Watkins Publishing commissioned her for 'The Secret Life of the Universe: The Quest for the Soul of Science'.
Elizabeth Edmondson, also known under the names Elizabeth Aston and Elizabeth Pewsey, was an English author who wrote primarily in the mystery, historical, and contemporary fiction genres. She studied Jane Austen while a student at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and many of her published stories were adaptations and sequels of Austen's works, beginning with Mr. Darcy's Daughters in 2003. Edmondson also founded a youth holiday orchestra to provide musical opportunities for local young people in the York area, an organisation that has operated since 1992. Her son, Anselm Audley, is a fantasy author.
Melissa Ashley is an Australian novelist. In the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards, her novel The Birdman's Wife won the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award. It also received the Australian Booksellers Association Nielsen BookData 2017 Booksellers Choice Award.
John Purcell is an Australian author whose novels include The Secret Lives of Emma published by Penguin Random House in 2012 and The Girl on the Page, published by HarperCollins Australia in October 2018. He is also the Director of Books at Booktopia and Angus & Robertson Bookworld. He appears regularly in print, on television and at Australian writers' festivals to talk about books and the publishing industry.
Dara McAnulty is a Northern Irish naturalist, writer and environmental campaigner. He is the youngest ever winner of the RSPB Medal and received the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing in 2020 after being the youngest author to be shortlisted for the award. He is also the youngest author to be long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction and for the shortlist for the 2020 Books Are My Bag Readers' Awards, which he won in the non-fiction category
The Second Shelf is an independent bookshop in Soho, London with a focus on rare or rediscovered women's literature. It was founded in 2018 as a feminist bookshop. It also operates as an online bookshop. The name "The Second Shelf" comes from the title of Meg Wolitzer's 2012 essay in The New York Times Book Review about sexism towards women's fiction. It is a reference to The Second Sex, a book by Simone de Beauvoir.