Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces, which was adapted for the screen in 2007.
The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is a learned society founded in 1820, by King George IV, to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". A charity that represents the voice of literature in the UK, the RSL has about 600 Fellows, elected from among the best writers in any genre currently at work. Additionally, Honorary Fellows are chosen from those who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of literature, including publishers, agents, librarians, booksellers or producers. The society is a cultural tenant at London's Somerset House.
Dame Marina Sarah Warner, is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.
Geoff Dyer is an English author. He has written a number of novels and non-fiction books, some of which have won literary awards.
Edward St Aubyn is an English author and journalist. He is the author of ten novels, including notably the semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels. In 2006, Mother's Milk was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Benjamin Myers is an English writer and journalist.
Paul Farley FRSL is a British poet, writer and broadcaster.
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.
Alice Albinia is an English journalist and author whose first book, Empires of the Indus, won several awards.
The Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Awards for Non-Fiction were financial awards made to assist new writers of non-fiction to carry out new research, and/or to devote more time to writing. The awards were administrated by the Royal Society of Literature on behalf of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002), and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Lucy Angela Hughes-Hallett is a British cultural historian, biographer and novelist. In November 2013, she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction for her biography of the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Pike. The book also won the 2013 Costa Book Award (Biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize.
Ian Thomson is an English author, best known for his biography Primo Levi (2002), and reportage, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009)
Gaby Wood, Hon. FRSL, is an English journalist, author and literary critic who has written for publications including The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, London Review of Books, Granta, and Vogue. She is the literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, appointed in succession to Ion Trewin and having taken over the post at the conclusion of the prize for 2015.
Aida Edemariam is an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist based in the UK, who has worked in New York, Toronto and London. She was formerly deputy review and books editor of the Canadian National Post, and is now a senior feature writer and editor at The Guardian in the UK. She lives in Oxford. Her memoir about her Ethiopian grandmother, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History, won the Ondaatje Prize in 2019.
Damian James Le Bas is a British writer and journalist from West Sussex in England best known for his book The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain.
Daisy Hay is Associate Professor in English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter and an author of non-fiction. Hay was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World is a 2017 book by Catherine Nixey. In the book, Nixey argues that early Christians deliberately destroyed classical Greek and Roman cultures and contributed to the loss of classical knowledge. The book was an international bestseller, was translated into 12 languages and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018. The New York Times called it a “ballista-bolt of a book”. The book received positive reviews from academics such as Peter Frankopan, professor of Global History at Oxford University, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, and others who praised its style and originality. It received criticism from some scholars of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, who accused it of telling a simplistic, polemical narrative and exaggerating the extent to which early Christians suppressed aspects of older Greek and Roman cultures.
Rachel Hewitt is a writer of creative non-fiction, and lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University.
Polly Morland is a British writer and documentary maker.
