Jo Baker is a British writer. She is the author of six novels, including Longbourn . She has also written short stories for BBC Radio 4 and reviews for The Guardian and The New York Times Book Review . In 2018, she was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Queen's University Belfast, and she is currently an Honorary Fellow at Lancaster University.
Baker was born and grew up in the village of Arkholme, in Lancashire, England. She was educated at Queen Elizabeth School, Kirkby Lonsdale, and Somerville College, Oxford. She moved to Belfast in 1995 to study for an MA in Irish literature at Queen's University, [1] where she went on to complete a PhD on the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen.
Baker lives in Lancaster with her husband, the playwright and screenwriter Daragh Carville, and their two children.
Pride and Prejudice is the second novel by English author Jane Austen, published in 1813. A novel of manners, it follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness.
Charlotte Wood is an Australian novelist. The Australian newspaper described Wood as "one of our [Australia's] most original and provocative writers".
A parallel novel is an in-universe pastiche piece of literature written within, derived from, or taking place during the framework of another work of fiction by the same or another author with respect to continuity.
Neil Griffiths is a British novelist, and the founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses. He is the winner of the Authors' Club First Novel Award, and has been shortlisted for best novel in the Costa Book Awards.
Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages. Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.
Ross Raisin FRSL is a British novelist and short story writer.
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.
Francis Spufford FRSL is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has shifted gradually from non-fiction to fiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 Spufford was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Jane Austen fan fiction is the collection of numerous sequels and spin-offs produced by authors who have either used the plot of Austen's original novels, or have extended them, to produce new works of fiction. Austen's posthumous popularity has inspired fan fiction that runs the gamut through numerous genres, but the most concentrated medium has remained the novel. According to Pucci and Thompson in their 2003 survey on the contemporary evolution of Jane Austen's work, at the turn of the 20th century, over one hundred sequels, rewritings, and continuations of her novels had been published.
Pure is a 2011 novel by English author Andrew Miller. The book is the sixth novel by Miller and was released on 9 June 2011 in the United Kingdom through Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton. The novel is set in pre-revolutionary France and the upcoming turmoil is a consistent theme throughout. It follows an engineer named Jean-Baptiste Baratte and chronicles his efforts in clearing an overfilled graveyard that is polluting the surrounding area. Baratte makes friends and enemies as the cemetery is both loved and hated by the people of the district.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish poet and essayist who writes in both Irish and English.
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.
Longbourn is a 2013 novel by the British author Jo Baker. It gives an alternative view of the events in Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, telling the story from the perspective of the servants at Longbourn, the Bennet family home. It was published by Doubleday in the UK and by Knopf in the US. It has been translated into twenty-one languages, was shortlisted for the IBW Book Award and is due to be made into a film, adapted by Angela Workman and Jessica Swale and directed by Sharon Maguire.
The Books Are My Bag Readers' Awards are annual literary awards presented by the Booksellers Association in the UK and Ireland since 2016. They are sponsored by National Book Tokens.
Holly Bourne is a British author of young adult fiction. She is the author of best-selling novel Am I Normal Yet? and several other critically acclaimed books. She also writes online on feminist issues and writes for The Mix, a charity-run advice website for under-25s.
Yvvette Edwards FRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage. Her first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, was published in 2011 to much acclaim and prize nominations that included the Man Booker Prize longlist and the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist. Edwards followed this debut work five years later with The Mother (2016), a novel that "reinforces her accomplishment". She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Onjali Qatara Raúf is a British author and the founder of the two NGOs: Making Herstory, a woman's rights organisation tackling the abuse and trafficking of women and girls in the UK; and O's Refugee Aid Team, which raises awareness and funds to support refugee frontline aid organisations.
Oyinkan Braithwaite is a Nigerian-British novelist and writer. She was born in Lagos and spent her childhood in both Nigeria and the UK. Braithwaite is best known for her debut novel My Sister, the Serial Killer.
Helen Sedgwick is an author of literary fiction, science fiction and crime, a literary editor, and a research physicist.
Dolly Alderton is a British author and screenwriter. She is also columnist for The Sunday Times. Her memoir Everything I Know About Love won a 2018 National Book Award for autobiography and was shortlisted for the 2019 Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year in the British Book Awards, and adapted into a BBC/Peacock eponymous television drama series.
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