Polly Morland is a British writer and documentary maker.
She worked in television for 15 years as a producer and director of documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery, [1] including The 9/11 Conspiracies (2004), [2] Who Wrote the Bible? (2004) [3] and The Fourth Age 410 AD - 1066 AD in the series Seven Ages of Britain (2003). [4]
Morland received a Jerwood Award in 2011 for work on her 2013 book The Society of Timid Souls: Or How to be Brave. The award was given by the Royal Society of Literature for "to authors engaged on their first major commissioned works of non-fiction". [5] The book is a study of courage and takes its name from a group set up by 1940s American concert pianist Bernard Gabriel to help performers overcome stage fright. [6] In the course of the book Morland talks to "soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils ... a man who fixes the upper sections of skyscrapers, and is afraid of heights ... people who have been diagnosed with terminal diseases ... a former armed robber." [7]
Her 2022 work A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. [8] The book mirrors John Berger's 1967 work A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, after Morland found a copy of this work while clearing her mother's house and realised that it was an account of a GP's life in the same area. She contacted a contemporary doctor working in the area, who herself had been inspired to take up medicine after reading Berger's book as a child, and the book is an account of her 21st-century general practice. [9] [10]
Morland held a Royal Society of Literature fellowship at Cardiff University in 2020–2023. [1]
Dandy Nichols was an English actress best known for her role as Else Garnett, the long-suffering wife of the character Alf Garnett who was a parody of a working class Tory, in the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part.
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English. The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
The British Film Institute (BFI) is a film and television charitable organisation which promotes and preserves film-making and television in the United Kingdom. The BFI uses funds provided by the National Lottery to encourage film production, distribution, and education. It is sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and partially funded under the British Film Institute Act 1949.
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple is a Delhi-based Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, photographer, broadcaster and critic. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers' festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
Lisa Appignanesi is a Polish-born British-Canadian writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression. Until 2021, she was the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London. She chaired the 2017 Booker International Prize won by Olga Tokarczuk.
Denis Gifford was a British writer, broadcaster, journalist, comic artist and historian of film, comics, television and radio. In his lengthy career, he wrote and drew for British comics; wrote more than fifty books on the creators, performers, characters and history of popular media; devised, compiled and contributed to popular programmes for radio and television; and directed several short films. Gifford was also a major comics collector, owning what was perhaps the largest collection of British comics in the world.
Eileen Cooper is a British artist, known primarily as a painter and printmaker.
Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, fiction writer, essayist and blogger. He is also a professor of creative writing.
Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.
Baillie Gifford & Co is an investment management firm which is wholly owned by partners, all of whom work within the firm. It was founded in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1908 and still has its headquarters in the city. It has corporate offices in New York and London.
Andrea Wulf is a German-British historian and writer who has written books, newspaper articles and book reviews.
Kate Summerscale is an English writer and journalist.
Ronald Rae is a sculptor and graphic artist born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1946. His large-scale granite sculptures are entirely hand-carved, and over the course of 58 years, he has carved 58 monoliths, many of which are in public and private collections throughout the UK, with one placed in the USA. Rae's sculpture exhibitions include Regent's Park, London (1999–2002), the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2002-04), and Holyrood Park, Edinburgh (2006-08). Rae is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
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.
The Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Awards for Non-Fiction were financial awards made to assist new writers of non-fiction to carry out new research, and/or to devote more time to writing. The awards were administrated by the Royal Society of Literature on behalf of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
The Hastings Contemporary is a museum of contemporary British art located on The Stade in Hastings, East Sussex and is a not-for-profit organisation. The gallery opened in March 2012 as the Jerwood Gallery and cost £4m to build. The gallery contains temporary exhibitions that included work from artists including L. S. Lowry, Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Walter Sickert, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Caulfield, Maggi Hambling, Craigie Aitchison and Prunella Clough.
Gavin Francis is a Scottish physician and a writer on travel and medical matters. He was raised in Fife, Scotland and now lives in Edinburgh as a GP. His books have won many prestigious prizes.
Raymond Antrobus is a British poet, educator and writer, who has been performing poetry since 2007. In March 2019, he won the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry. In May 2019, Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for his collection The Perseverance, praised by chair of the judges as "an immensely moving book of poetry which uses his deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other." Antrobus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.
Rachel Hewitt is a writer of creative non-fiction, and lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University.
Tom Hammick is painter and a printmaker working in London. He was Glyndebourne's Associate Artist during the 2021 and 2022 festivals.