Fiammetta Rocco is a journalist and author. She is a Senior Editor at The Economist. [1]
Rocco was born to a Franco-Italian family and grew up in Kenya. She went on to study Arabic at the University of Oxford. [2]
Rocco is the Administrator of the International Booker Prize [2] [3] and she is on the board of directors for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. [4]
She was the Culture Editor at The Economist between 2003 and 2018. [1]
In 2003, she published a book called The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria and the Quest for a Cure That Changed the World about the discovery of quinine, which was the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. [5] [6]
In 2021, Rocco was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [3]
Cinchona is a genus of flowering plants in the family Rubiaceae containing at least 23 species of trees and shrubs. All are native to the tropical Andean forests of western South America. A few species are reportedly naturalized in Central America, Jamaica, French Polynesia, Sulawesi, Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and São Tomé and Príncipe off the coast of tropical Africa, and others have been cultivated in India and Java, where they have formed hybrids.
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 Bight of Benin or Bay of Benin is a bight in the Gulf of Guinea area on the western African coast that derives its name from the historical Kingdom of Benin.
Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to." She also writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio.
Anna Funder is an Australian author. She is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am, the novella The Girl With the Dogs and, about George Orwell's first wife, Wifedom.
Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting".
Kathleen Jamie FRSL is a Scottish poet and essayist. In 2021 she became Scotland's fourth Makar.
Miranda Carter is an English historian, writer and biographer who also publishes fiction under the name MJ Carter.
Anna Burns FRSL is an author from Northern Ireland. Her novel Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize, the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
Sophie Cunningham is an Australian writer and editor based in Melbourne. She is the current Chair of the Board of the Australian Society of Authors, the national peak body representing Australian authors.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Elisabeth Nicole Calder is an English publisher and book editor.
Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.
Maya Jaggi is a British writer, literary critic, editor and cultural journalist. In the words of the Open University, from which Jaggi received an honorary doctorate in 2012, she "has had a transformative influence in the last 25 years in extending the map of international writing today". Jaggi has been a contributor to a wide range of publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, New Statesman, Wasafiri, Index on Censorship, and Newsweek, and is particularly known for her profiles of writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and others. She is also a broadcaster and presenter on radio and television. Jaggi is the niece of actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey.
Ann Wroe FRSL is an English author and columnist who has been the obituaries editor of The Economist since 2003.
Boyd Tonkin Hon. FRSL is an English writer, journalist and literary critic. He was the literary editor of The Independent newspaper from 1996 to 2013. A long-time proponent of foreign-language literature, he is the author of The 100 Best Novels in Translation (2018). He has been involved with leading literary prizes such as the Man Booker International Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In 2020 Tonkin was the recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.
Helen Pearson is a science journalist, author and Chief Magazine Editor for the journal Nature, where she oversees the journalism and opinion content. She is the author of The Life Project, a book about the British birth cohort studies, a series of longitudinal studies which have tracked thousands of people since their birth.
Douglas Kerr is a British writer and academic who is best known for his work on Arthur Conan Doyle and George Orwell.
Preti Taneja FRSL is a British writer, screenwriter and educator. She is currently professor of world literature and creative writing at Newcastle University. Her first novel, We That Are Young, won the Desmond Elliott Prize and was shortlisted for several awards, including the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Prix Jan Michalski, and the Shakti Bhatt Prize. In 2005, a film she co-wrote was shortlisted for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Taneja's second book, Aftermath, is an account of the 2019 London Bridge terror attack, and describes her knowledge of the victims, as well as her experience having previously taught the perpetrator of the attacks in a prison education programme.
Manuel Incra Mamani was a Bolivian Incan cascarillero who found a cinchona tree that had a higher proportion of quinine than most others. It went into commercial cultivation, providing most of the world's quinine.