Sixty-Six Books was a set of plays premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2011, to mark the theatre's reopening on a new site and the 400th anniversary of the King James Version. It drew its title from the 66 books of the Protestant Bible. The special show ran from 10 October 10 to 29 October 2011, with special 24-hour shows on 15 and 29 October; the production featured 130 actors, including Miranda Raison, Ralf Little, Billy Bragg, and Rafe Spall.
Sir Timothy Miles Bindon Rice is an English lyricist and author. He is best known for his collaborations with Disney on Aladdin, The Lion King, the stage adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, and the original Broadway musical Aida; with Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA, with whom he wrote Chess; and with Andrew Lloyd Webber, with whom he wrote, among other shows, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. He also wrote lyrics for the Alan Menken musical King David, and for DreamWorks Animation's The Road to El Dorado.
Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces, which was adapted for the screen in 2007.
Jeanette Winterson is an English author. Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. Other novels explore gender polarities and sexual identity and later ones the relations between humans and technology. She broadcasts and teaches creative writing. She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She has received an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet, author, playwright and television presenter. He was the first writer in residence to be appointed by any national rugby union team.
James Martin Fenton is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Toby Litt is an English writer and academic based at the University of Southampton.
Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Nicholas Laird is a Northern Irish novelist and poet.
The Bush Theatre is located in the Passmore Edwards Public Library, Shepherd's Bush, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. It was established in 1972 as a showcase for the work of new writers.
Moira Buffini is an English dramatist, director, and actor.
Katherine Jane Parkinson is an English actress and comedian. She appeared in Channel 4's The IT Crowd comedy series as Jen Barber, for which she received a British Comedy Best TV Actress Award in 2009 and 2014, and was nominated twice for the BAFTA Television Award for Best Female Comedy Performance, winning in 2014. Parkinson studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and has appeared on stage in the plays The Seagull (2007), Cock (2009), and Home, I'm Darling (2018), for which she was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Michael Bartlett is an English playwright and screenwriter for film and TV series. His 2015 psychological thriller TV series, Doctor Foster, starring Suranne Jones, won the New Drama award from National Television Awards. Bartlett also won Best Writer from the Broadcast Press Guild Awards. A BBC TV Film of Bartlett's play King Charles III was broadcast in May 2017 and while critically acclaimed, generated some controversy.
Helen Edmundson is a British playwright, screenwriter and producer. She has won awards and critical acclaim both for her original writing and for her adaptations of various literary classics for the stage and screen.
Josie Rourke is an English theatre and film director. She is a Vice-President of the London Library and was the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse theatre from 2012 to 2019. In 2018, she made her feature film debut with the Academy Award and BAFTA-nominated historical drama Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.
Alia Bano is a British playwright of Pashtun origin.
Daniel Craig Jackson, also known as D.C. Jackson, is a Scottish playwright, born in 1980.
Wena Poon is a lawyer and novelist based in the United States. She writes English-language fiction. Her work has been seen by academics in the UK, US and Singapore as representative of the transnationalism of her generation.
Nick Payne is a British playwright and screenwriter.
Steve Waters is a British playwright. He was born in Coventry, UK. He studied English at Oxford University, taught in secondary schools and was a graduate of David Edgar's MA in Playwriting in 1993, a course which he later ran for several years. He has written about the pedagogy of playwriting, contributed articles to The Guardian, essays to The Blackwell Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama and The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, and has written a book entitled, The Secret Life of Plays (2010).
Zukiswa Wanner is a South African journalist, novelist and editor born in Zambia and now based in Kenya. Since 2006, when she published her first book, her novels have been shortlisted for awards including the South African Literary Awards (SALA) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2015, she won the K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award for London Cape Town Joburg (2014). In 2014, Wanner was named on the Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define trends in African literature. In 2020, she was awarded the Goethe Medal alongside Ian McEwan and Elvira Espejo Ayca, making Wanner the first African woman to win the award.