Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman is an English writer. His books include the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, a fictionalised biography of Jesus. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". In a 2004 BBC poll, he was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture. He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to literature.
The Mabinogion are the earliest British prose stories, and belong to the Matter of Britain. The stories were compiled in Middle Welsh in the 12th–13th centuries from earlier oral traditions. There are two main source manuscripts, created c. 1350–1410, as well as a few earlier fragments. The title covers a collection of eleven prose stories of widely different types, offering drama, philosophy, romance, tragedy, fantasy and humour, and created by various narrators over time. There is a classic hero quest, "Culhwch and Olwen"; a historic legend in "Lludd and Llefelys," complete with glimpses of a far off age; and other tales portray a very different King Arthur from the later popular versions. The highly sophisticated complexity of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi defies categorisation. The stories are so diverse that it has been argued that they are not even a true collection.
British literature is literature from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. This article covers British literature in the English language. Anglo-Saxon literature is included, and there is some discussion of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature, where literature in these languages relate to the early development of the English language and literature. There is also some brief discussion of major figures who wrote in Scots, but the main discussion is in the various Scottish literature articles.
Huw Edwards is a Welsh journalist, presenter, and newsreader. Edwards presents BBC News at Ten, the corporation's flagship news broadcast.
David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter.
Robert Patrick Webb is an English comedian, actor, writer, and television personality. He is one half of the double act Mitchell and Webb, alongside David Mitchell. Webb and Mitchell both starred in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, in which Webb plays Jeremy "Jez" Usbourne. The two also starred the sketch comedy programme That Mitchell and Webb Look, for which they then performed a stage adaption, The Two Faces of Mitchell and Webb. The duo starred in the 2007 film Magicians, and in the short-lived series Ambassadors. Webb headed the critically acclaimed sitcom The Smoking Room and was a performer in the sketch show Bruiser. Since 2017, he has starred alongside Mitchell in the Channel 4 comedy-drama Back.
Caradog Prichard was a Welsh poet and novelist writing in Welsh. His daughter, Mari Prichard, was married to the late Humphrey Carpenter.
Michel Faber is a Dutch-born writer of English-language fiction, including his 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White. His latest book is a novel for young adults, D: A Tale of Two Worlds, published in 2020.
"It was a dark and stormy night" is an often-mocked and parodied phrase considered to represent "the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing", also known as purple prose.
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.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. Her 2014 Costa Poetry Award was for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Theatre of United Kingdom plays an important part in British culture, and the countries that constitute the UK have had a vibrant tradition of theatre since the Renaissance with roots going back to the Roman occupation.
Alasdair James Gray was a Scottish writer and artist. His first novel, Lanark (1981), is seen as a landmark of Scottish fiction. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.
A Child's Christmas in Wales is a piece of prose by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas recorded by Thomas in 1952. Emerging from an earlier piece he wrote for BBC Radio, the work is an anecdotal reminiscence of a Christmas from the viewpoint of a young boy, portraying a nostalgic and simpler time. It is one of Thomas's most popular works.
Submarine is a novel by Joe Dunthorne. First published by Hamish Hamilton in 2008, it was adapted into a film in 2010.
Un Nos Ola Leuad is a novel written by Welsh writer Caradog Prichard. It was first published in 1961. It has been translated into English by Philip Mitchell.
Theatre in Wales includes dramatic works in both the Welsh language and English language. Actors from Wales have also achieved international recognition.
Manon Steffan Ros is a Welsh novelist, playwright, games author, scriptwriter and musician. She is the author of over twenty children's books and three novels for adults, all in Welsh. Her award-winning novel Blasu has been translated into English, under the title of The Seasoning. In May 2021 she was described as "arguably the most successful novelist writing in Welsh at the moment".
Mari Strachan is a Welsh novelist and librarian. Her first novel, The Earth Hums in B Flat, works on one level as a detective story, while on another dealing with the problems of growing up in a small Welsh village in the 1950s, and more generally with the influence of the past on the present.
John Gwilym Jones was a Welsh dramatist, novelist, short-story writer, drama director, academic and critic, considered a pre-eminent figure in those fields. In particular, he is widely acknowledged to be one of the two greatest 20th-century Welsh playwrights, along with Saunders Lewis; of his many plays, Hanes Rhyw Gymro (1964), Ac Eto Nid Myfi (1976) and Yr Adduned (1979) are considered masterpieces. Almost all of his work was written in the Welsh language. A writer in the modernist tradition, he is credited with introducing Brechtian techniques, stream-of-consciousness narrative and Freudianism to Welsh literature. Creative writers such as Kate Roberts and John Rowlands owed him a profound debt, and a whole generation of critics were influenced by his work as a teacher of Welsh literature.
