Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honor posthumously.
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. The novel's themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.
Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell.
The Modern Library is an American book publishing imprint and formerly the parent company of Random House. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, Modern Library became an independent publishing company in 1925 when Boni & Liveright sold it to Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. Random House began in 1927 as a subsidiary of the Modern Library and eventually overtook its parent company, with Modern Library becoming an imprint of Random House.
Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke, an English writer best remembered for the novels Party Going, Living, and Loving. He published a total of nine novels between 1926 and 1952. He is considered as one of the group designated in the 1920s/30s as the 'Bright Young People' by the tabloid press.
Bernhard Schlink is a German lawyer, academic, and novelist. He is best known for his novel The Reader, which was first published in 1995 and became an international bestseller. He won the 2014 Park Kyong-ni Prize.
Faber and Faber Limited, commonly known as Faber & Faber or simply Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Miroslav Holub was a Czech poet and immunologist.
Henry Treece was a British poet and writer who also worked as a teacher and editor. He wrote a range of works but is mostly remembered as a writer of children's historical novels.
Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright, poet and polemicist who is considered one of the most important German-language authors of the postwar era. He explored themes of death, isolation, obsession and illness in controversial literature that was pessimistic about the human condition and highly critical of post-war Austrian and European culture. He developed a distinctive prose style often featuring multiple perspectives on characters and events, idiosyncratic vocabulary and punctuation, and long monologues by protagonists on the verge of insanity.
The Last King of Scotland is a novel by journalist Giles Foden, published by Faber and Faber in 1998. Focusing on the rise of Ugandan President Idi Amin and his reign as dictator from 1971 to 1979, the novel, which interweaves fiction and historical fact, is written as the memoir of a fictional Scottish doctor in Amin's employ. Foden's novel received critical acclaim and numerous awards when it was published. In 2006, a loose eponymous film adaptation was released.
A verse novel is a type of narrative poetry in which a novel-length narrative is told through the medium of poetry rather than prose. Either simple or complex stanzaic verse-forms may be used, but there is usually a large cast, multiple voices, dialogue, narration, description, and action in a novelistic manner.
Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006), about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
My Name Is Red is a 1998 Turkish novel by writer Orhan Pamuk translated into English by Erdağ Göknar in 2001. The novel, concerning miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire of 1591, established Pamuk's international reputation and contributed to his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".
Jacqueline Rose, FBA, FRSL is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
Laurence Daren King is an English novelist and children's writer. His debut novel, Boxy an Star, made the shortlist for the Guardian First Book Award and the ten finalists for the Booker Prize in 1999. He won the Nestlé Children's Book Prize gold medal in the 6 to 8-year-old readers category for Mouse Noses on Toast in 2006.
Mary Morrissy is an Irish novelist and short story writer. She writes on art, fiction, and history. Morrissy is an elected member of Aosdána, Ireland's academy of artists and writers.
Mary Jean Chan is a Hong Kong-Chinese poet, lecturer, editor and critic whose debut poetry collection, Flèche, won the 2019 Costa Book Award in the poetry category. Chan's second book, Bright Fear, was published by Faber in 2023. In 2023, Chan served as a judge for the Booker Prize.
