Books
Scudamore's first novel The Amnesia Clinic won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Glen Dimplex Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. [1] It was described by Hilary Mantel as "A wonderful debut – witty, polished, fluent and effortlessly entertaining" and by the judges of the Costa Award as a "delightful book ... full of tall tales and fantasy". [1]
His second novel, Heliopolis , was published in 2009. [2] Writing in The Guardian , Henry Shukman commented that "In his second novel, set in contemporary São Paulo, Scudamore does not embed a transplant from his own culture in foreign soil. Instead he takes the plunge and boldly invests himself in a first-person narrator. The novel is cleverly pitched to explore the two socioeconomic poles of modern urban Brazil. And the writing is exemplary: you feel the hand of a natural at work, one whose command of tone is strong, and who has an instinctive feel for handling a story." [3] The novel was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. [4]
Following the publication in 2013 of his third novel, Wreaking, [5] the BBC Today programme interviewed Scudamore inside the grounds of the derelict Severalls Hospital in Colchester, where he explained how visits to such sites, rendered defunct by the Care in the Community Act, had directly inspired the book. [6] The novelist Alan Warner described Wreaking as "an immersion in the physical and psychic ruins of a contemporary Britain which enchants and disturbs, lures and repels". [5]
English Monsters is Scudamore's fourth novel and was published in 2020. [7] It depicts the effects of physical and sexual abuse at a boarding prep school on a group of friends over a thirty-year period. Edward Docx wrote of this "dark, tender, troubling novel" that "it is impossible to read these pages and not to think of the present blight of emotionally cauterised boarding-school politicians whose various pathologies, fantasies and defence mechanisms Britain must continue to endure." [8]
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).
Dame Rose Tremain is an English novelist, short story writer, and former Chancellor of the University of East Anglia.
The University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course was founded by Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Sir Angus Wilson in 1970. The M.A. has been regarded among the most prestigious in the United Kingdom.
David Bezmozgis is a Latvian-born Canadian writer and filmmaker, currently the head of Humber College's School for Writers.
George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Kelly Link is an American editor and writer. Mainly known as an author of short stories, she published her first novel The Book of Love in 2024. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.
Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and social alienation.
Giles Foden is an English author, best known for his novel The Last King of Scotland (1998).
Tash Aw, whose full name is Aw Ta-Shi is a Malaysian writer living in London.
Edward Docx is a British writer.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Mohammed Hanif is a British Pakistani writer and journalist who writes a monthly opinion piece in The New York Times.
Ira Mathur is an Indian-born Trinidad and Tobago multimedia freelance journalist, Sunday Guardian columnist and writer. The longest-running columnist for the Sunday Guardian, she has been writing an op-ed for the paper since 1995, except for a hiatus from 2003 to 2004 when she wrote for the Daily Express. She has written more than eight hundred columns on politics, economics, social, health and developmental issues, locally, regionally and internationally.
Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut novel Then We Came to the End (2007). The novel is a comedy about the American workplace, is narrated in the first-person plural, and is set in a fictitious Chicago ad agency facing challenges at the end of the 1990s Internet boom.
Mick Jackson is a British writer from England, best known for his novel The Underground Man (1997). The book, based on the life of William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and for the 1997 Whitbread Award for best first novel.
Eleanor Catton is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Born in Canada, Catton moved to New Zealand as a child and grew up in Christchurch. She completed a master's degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master's thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author ever to win the prize and only the second New Zealander. It was subsequently adapted into a television miniseries, with Catton as screenwriter. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.
Heliopolis is a 2009 novel by the British author James Scudamore. It is set in the city and surrounding areas of contemporary São Paulo, Brazil, and follows the story of a young, favela-born man, Ludo dos Santos. The book was nominated for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and is Scudamore's second novel.
Marlon James is a Jamaican writer. He is the author of five novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won him the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022). Now living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the U.S., James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.
B.J. Hollars is an American author of literary essays and nonfiction novels. He is the author of several books, most recently Go West Young Man: A Father and Son Rediscover America on the Oregon Trail, Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians and the Weird in Flyover Country, The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders, Flock Together: A Love Affair With Extinct Birds,From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. Additionally, he has also written Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America, Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, Dispatches from the Drownings, and Sightings.
Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moshfegh's subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona.
