Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon was the younger daughter of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. She was the younger sister and only sibling of Queen Elizabeth II.
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.
The Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) is a book festival that takes place during two weeks in August every year in the centre of Edinburgh, Scotland. Described as The largest festival of its kind in the world, the festival hosts a series of cultural and political talks and debates, along with a well-established children's events programme.
James S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. Shapiro has served on the faculty at Columbia University since 1985, teaching Shakespeare and other topics, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture.
Hallie Rubenhold is an American-born 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.
Benedict Richard Pierce Macintyre is a British author, reviewer and columnist for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
Baillie Gifford & Co is an investment management firm which is wholly owned by partners, all of whom work within the firm. It was founded in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1908 and still has its headquarters in the city. It has corporate offices in New York and London.
Andrea Wulf is a German-British historian and writer who has written books, newspaper articles and book reviews.
Beatrice Dorothy "Bee" Wilson is a British food writer and journalist. She writes the "Table Talk" column for The Wall Street Journal, and is also a campaigner for food education through the charity TastEd.
Kate Summerscale is an English writer and journalist. She is best known for the bestselling narrative nonfiction books The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which was made into a television drama, The Wicked Boy and The Haunting of Alma Fielding. She has won a number of literary prizes, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction in 2008.
Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby; and Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream. In April 2021, she was long listed for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.
Frances Wilson is an English author, academic, and critic.
Katherine Rundell is an English author and academic. She is the author of Impossible Creatures, named Waterstones Book of the Year for 2023. She is also the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, Seriously.... and Private Passions.
Ma'am Darling: Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret is a 2017 book on the life of Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II, written by Craig Brown. It was published in the United States in 2018 as Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret.
Anne Veronica Tennant, Dowager Baroness Glenconner is a British peeress and socialite. The daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, Lady Glenconner served as a maid of honour at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, and was extra lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II's sister, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, from 1971 until the Princess died in 2002. Her 2019 memoir, Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown, was a New York Times Best Seller.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, GCSK, is a British-Mauritian historian. He has been a fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford since 1990. Most of his work relates to modern political history from 1850; including the history of contemporary France as well as Napoleon, the Republic and Charles de Gaulle.
Matthew Cobb is a British zoologist and professor of zoology at the University of Manchester. He is known for his popular science books The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth; Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code; and The Idea of the Brain: A History. Cobb has appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, The Life Scientific, and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, as well as on BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service.
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time is a non-fiction book written by satirist Craig Brown about the English rock band the Beatles. The book was published by 4th Estate on 10 April 2020, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the group's break-up.
Sally Hayden is an Irish journalist and writer. A foreign correspondent, she has reported from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda. Her book My Fourth Time, We Drowned, an investigation into the migrant crisis, was published in 2022 and awarded The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022, the 2022 Michel Déon Prize, and is the Overall Book of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards.
