Hazel Prior (born in Oxford, England) is a Celtic harpist and the author of four bestselling novels. Her books have wildlife and environmental themes and are published in over 20 different languages. Her second novel, Away with the Penguins, was a Richard & Judy Book Club pick in 2020, a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and a number one bestseller. Prior has lived in many places including Scotland, the Welsh borders, Italy and southwest England. Before turning to writing full time, she held a wide variety of jobs including teaching English as a foreign language and welcoming visitors to a castle. She currently lives on Exmoor. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.
Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in Hampshire in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way.
Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, is a British author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction. She is the widow of the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Harold Pinter (1930–2008), and prior to his death was also known as Lady Antonia Pinter.
Nell Leyshon is a British novelist and award-winning dramatist. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Alpine Fellowship and as the Deputy Chair of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Prior, she served on the Management Committee for the Society of Authors. Leyshon is known best for her novel,The Colour of Milk, which was translated into multiple languages and gained international recognition, winning the Prix Interallié in France where it was also shortlisted for the Prix Femina, and voted the book of the year in Spain.
Katherine Louise Mosse is a British novelist, non-fiction and short story writer and broadcaster. She is best known for her 2005 novel Labyrinth, which has been translated into more than 37 languages. She co-founded in 1996 the annual award for best UK-published English-language novel by a woman that is now known as the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Lynmouth is a village in Devon, England, on the northern edge of Exmoor. The village straddles the confluence of the West Lyn and East Lyn rivers, in a gorge 700 feet (210 m) directly below the neighbouring town of Lynton, which was the only place to expand to once Lynmouth became as built-up as possible. The villages are connected by the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway, which works two cable-connected cars by gravity, using water tanks.
Lionel Shriver is an American author and journalist who lives in Portugal. Her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005.
Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster, first published in 1910, about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. Howards End is considered by many to be Forster's masterpiece. The book was conceived in June 1908 and worked on throughout the following year; it was completed in July 1910.
Rachel Sabiha Johnson is a British journalist, television presenter, and author who has appeared frequently on political discussion panels, including The Pledge on Sky News and BBC One's debate programme, Question Time. In January 2018, she participated in the 21st series of Celebrity Big Brother and was evicted second. She was the lead candidate for Change UK for the South West England constituency in the 2019 European Parliament election.
Lucy Irvine is a British adventurer and author. She is known for spending a year on the uninhabited island of Tuin and for her book, Castaway (1983), describing the experience.
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.
Grace Dent is a British columnist, broadcaster and author. She is a restaurant critic for The Guardian and from 2011 to 2017 wrote a restaurant column for the Evening Standard. She is a regular critic on the BBC's MasterChef UK and has appeared on Channel 4's television series Very British Problems.
The Fault in Our Stars is a novel by John Green. It is his fourth solo novel, and sixth novel overall. It was published on January 10, 2012. The title is inspired by Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, in which the nobleman Cassius says to Brutus: "Men at some time were masters of their fates, / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings." The story is narrated by Hazel Grace Lancaster, a 16-year-old girl with thyroid cancer that has affected her lungs. Hazel is forced by her parents to attend a support group where she subsequently meets and falls in love with 17-year-old Augustus Waters, an ex-basketball player, amputee, and survivor of osteosarcoma.
Helen Ruth Castor is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and a BBC broadcaster. She taught history at the University of Cambridge and is the author of books including Blood and Roses (2004) and She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (2010). Programmes she has presented include BBC Radio 4's Making History and She-Wolves on BBC Four.
Kim Gruenenfelder is an American author and screenwriter. She became known for writing women's fiction, specifically romantic comedy fiction, novels.
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.
Christie Watson is a British writer and Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She worked as a nurse for more than twenty years, before becoming an author. She has written six books, including her first novel Tiny Sunbirds Far Away (2011), which won the Costa First Novel Award, and first memoir The Language of Kindness (2018), which was a number-one Sunday Times Bestseller. Her work has been translated into 23 languages and adapted for theatre. Her latest book Moral Injuries is currently being developed as a television series.
Holly Miranda Smale is a British writer. She wrote the Geek Girl series. The first book in the series won the 2014 Waterstones Children's Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2013. The final book, Forever Geek, was published by HarperCollins in March 2017.
Abimbola "Abi" Daré is a Nigerian author and public speaker who now lives in Essex, England. In 2018 she won the Bath Novel Award, and was a finalist in the Literary Consultancy Pen Factor 2018. Her debut novel The Girl With The Louding Voice was published in 2020 to critical acclaim.