Clarence Malcolm Lowry was an English poet and novelist who is best known for his 1947 novel Under the Volcano, which was voted No. 11 in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list.
David John Moore Cornwell, better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British and Irish author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. "A sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
Robert Dennis Harris is a British novelist and former journalist. Although he began his career in journalism and non-fiction, his fame rests upon his works of historical fiction. Beginning with the best-seller Fatherland, Harris focused on events surrounding the Second World War, followed by works set in ancient Rome. His most recent works centre on contemporary history. Harris was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Cambridge Union and editor of the student newspaper Varsity.
Cormac McCarthy was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. He was known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
The Society of Authors (SoA) is a United Kingdom trade union for professional writers, illustrators and literary translators, founded in 1884 to protect the rights and further the interests of authors. As of August 2022, it represents over 12,000 members and associates.
Tessa McWatt FRSL is a Guyanese-born Canadian writer. She has written seven novels and is a creative writing professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. In 2021 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet. He was named Laureate for Irish Fiction, 2019–2021.
The Costa Book Awards were a set of annual literary awards recognising English-language books by writers based in UK and Ireland. Originally named the Whitbread Book Awards from 1971 to 2005 after its first sponsor, the Whitbread company, then a brewery and owner of restaurant chains, it was renamed when Costa Coffee, then a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship. The companion Costa Short Story Award was established in 2012. Costa Coffee was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 2018. The awards were abruptly terminated in 2022.
Events from the year 1934 in the United Kingdom.
Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer who lives in the west of Ireland. He is a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project.
Zizzi is a chain of Italian-inspired restaurants in the United Kingdom and Ireland. In February 2015, Bridgepoint Capital completed a £250 million acquisition of ASK Italian and Zizzi, and subsequently bought by TowerBrook Capital Partners in 2020.
Richard Thomas Osman is an English television presenter, producer, novelist, and comedian. He is the creator and former co-presenter of the BBC One television quiz show Pointless. He has presented the BBC Two quiz shows Two Tribes and Richard Osman's House of Games and been a team captain on the comedy panel shows Insert Name Here and The Fake News Show. He has made appearances on many British panel shows including Would I Lie To You? and QI.
Madeline Miller is an American novelist, author of The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018). Miller spent ten years writing The Song of Achilles while she worked as a teacher of Latin and Greek. The novel tells the story of the love between the mythological figures Achilles and Patroclus; it won the Orange Prize for Fiction, making Miller the fourth debut novelist to win the prize. She is a 2019 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Olivia Katarina Sudjic is a British fiction writer whose first book, Sympathy, received positive reviews in the press, from publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian and The New Republic. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, compiled every 10 years since 1983, identifying the 20 most significant British novelists aged under 40.
Sinéad Gleeson is an Irish writer. Her essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Lifewon Non-Fiction Book of the Year at 2019 Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It was published in the US by Mariner books and translated into several languages. She is the editor of The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland and The Art of Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories.
Gordon Bowker was an English journalist and academic who wrote biographies of Malcolm Lowry, Lawrence Durrell, George Orwell and James Joyce.
The Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize is a British and Irish literary award for a novel focusing on travel, awarded annually by the Society of Authors. It was inaugurated in 2022, and is named for Malcolm Lowry's book Under the Volcano and endowed in memory of Gordon Bowker (1934-2019), Lowry's biographer, by Ramdei Bowker.
Caroline Ann Brothers is an Australian-born novelist, nonfiction writer, and former foreign correspondent.
Sheila Llewellyn is a writer from Northern Ireland.
