The Isle of Wight is an island, English county and unitary authority in the English Channel, 2 to 5 miles off the coast of Hampshire, across the Solent. It is the largest and second-most populous island in England. Referred to as "The Island" by residents, the Isle of Wight has resorts that have been popular holiday destinations since Victorian times. It is known for its mild climate, coastal scenery, and verdant landscape of fields, downland, and chines. The island is historically part of Hampshire. The island is designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. With a land area of 380 km2 (150 sq mi), it is about half the size of Singapore.
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
Sandown is a seaside resort and civil parish on the south-east coast of the Isle of Wight, England. The neighbouring resort of Shanklin and the settlement of Lake are sited just to the south of the town. Sandown has a population of 11,654 according to the 2021 Census, and the three Sandown Bay settlements form a built-up area of more than 20,000 inhabitants. Sandown is the Bay's northernmost town, with its easily accessible, sandy beaches running continuously from the cliffs below Battery Gardens in the south to Yaverland in the north.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's sixth novel. Published in 1999, it is a variation on the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, with rock music replacing Orpheus's lyre. The myth works as a red thread from which the author sometimes strays, but to which he attaches an endless series of references.
The ancient 'Kynges Towne' of Brading is the main town of the civil parish of the same name. The ecclesiastical parish of Brading used to cover about a tenth of the Isle of Wight. The civil parish now includes the town itself and Adgestone, Morton, Nunwell and other outlying areas between Ryde, St Helens, Bembridge, Sandown and Arreton. Alverstone was transferred to the Newchurch parish some thirty years ago.
Tracy Rose Chevalier is an American-British novelist. She is best known for her second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was adapted as a 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth.
White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Bryan Stanley William Johnson was an English experimental novelist, poet and literary critic. He also produced television programmes and made films.
Amsterdam is a 1998 novel by British writer Ian McEwan, for which he was awarded the 1998 Booker Prize.
As an island, the Isle of Wight maintains a culture close to, but distinct from, that of the south of England. A high proportion of the population are now 'overners' rather than locally born, and so with a few notable exceptions it has more often formed the backdrop for cultural events of wider rather than island-specific significance.
The Rings of Saturn is a 1995 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. Its first-person narrative arc is the account by a nameless narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. In addition to describing the places he sees and people he encounters, including translator Michael Hamburger, Sebald discusses various episodes of history and literature, including the introduction of silkworm cultivation to Europe, and the writings of Thomas Browne, which attach in some way to the larger text. The book was published in English in 1998.
Love, Etc is a novel by Julian Barnes published in 2000, although it is also the title of a French film based on his earlier novel Talking It Over.
The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel written by British author Julian Barnes. The book is Barnes's eleventh novel written under his own name and was released on 4 August 2011 in the United Kingdom. The Sense of an Ending is narrated by a retired man named Tony Webster, who recalls how he and his clique met Adrian Finn at school and vowed to remain friends for life. When the past catches up with Tony, he reflects on the paths he and his friends have taken. In October 2011, The Sense of an Ending was awarded the Booker Prize. The following month it was nominated in the novels category at the Costa Book Awards.
The Lemon Table is the second collection of short stories written by Julian Barnes, and has the general theme of old age. It was first published in 2004 by Jonathan Cape.
Mea Allan, born Mary Eleanor Allan, was a journalist who worked for the Glasgow Herald. She also wrote a novel, Change of Heart (1943), set in the future. In 1967 she was awarded the Leverhulme Research Scholarship to write about the botanists William Hooker and Joseph Dalton Hooker.
The Courtship of Morrice Buckler is an 1896 novel by the English author AEW Mason. It bears the subtitle A Romance : Being a Record of the Growth of an English Gentleman during the years 1685–1687, under strange and difficult circumstances / written some while afterwards in his own hand, and now edited by / A.E.W. Mason.
