Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting related to the past events, but is fictional. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for the historical romance, it can also be applied to other types of narrative, including theatre, opera, cinema, and television, as well as video games and graphic novels.
Zadie Adeline Smith FRSL 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 has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels".
Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirty something singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love. Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and The Edge of Reason (1999) were published in 40 countries and sold more than 15 million copies. The two films of the same name achieved international success. In a survey conducted by The Guardian newspaper, Bridget Jones's Diary was named as one of the ten novels that best defined the 20th century.
Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
Sarah Ann Waters is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books.
Swedish literature refers to literature written in the Swedish language or by writers from Sweden.
Pauline Melville FRSL is a Guyanese-born writer and former actor of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry, who is currently based in London, England. Among awards she has received for her writing – which encompasses short stories, novels and essays – are the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Guyana Prize for Literature. Salman Rushdie has said: "I believe her to be one of the few genuinely original writers to emerge in recent years."
Louise Welsh is an English-born author of short stories and psychological thrillers, resident in Glasgow, Scotland. She has also written three plays, an opera, edited volumes of prose and poetry, and contributed to journals and anthologies. In 2004, she received the Corine Literature Prize.
Jane Mary Gardam is an English writer of children's and adult fiction. She also writes reviews for The Spectator and The Telegraph, and writes for BBC radio. She lives in Kent, Wimbledon, and Yorkshire. She has won numerous literary awards, including the Whitbread Award twice. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. She has published half a dozen novels, many short stories and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Her writing explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
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.
Nikita Lalwani FRSL is a novelist born in Kota, Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff, Wales.
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, 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 Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Uzma Aslam Khan is a Pakistani writer. Her five novels include Trespassing (2003), The Geometry of God (2008), Thinner Than Skin (2012) and The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019).
Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on Granta magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Her 2021 novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, making her the first British Somali novelist to get this honour. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including The Guardian, and contributed poetry to the anthology New Daughters of Africa. She was also a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London until 2021. She will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in Spring 2022.
Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby; and Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream. In April 2021, she was long listed for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.
Kavery Nambisan is an Indian surgeon and novelist. Her career in medicine has been a strong influence in her fiction.
Anjali Joseph is an Indian novelist. Her first novel, Saraswati Park (2010), was a critical success and earned her several awards, including the Betty Trask Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her second novel, Another Country, was released in 2012. In 2010, she was listed by The Telegraph as one of the 20 best writers under the age of 40. Her third novel, The Living (2016), was shortlisted for the DSC Prize and is a tender, lyrical and often funny novel which shines a light on everyday life, illuminating its humour, beauty, and truth. Her fourth novel Keeping in Touch, was published in India in 2021 by Context and will be published in the UK in 2022 by Scribe.
