Stef Penney (born 1965 in Edinburgh) is a Scottish filmmaker and novelist.
She grew up in the Scottish capital and turned to film-making after a degree in Philosophy and Theology from Bristol University. She made three short films before studying Film and TV at Bournemouth College of Art, and on graduation was selected for the Carlton Television New Writers Scheme. She has also written and directed two short films; a BBC 10 x 10 starring Anna Friel and a Film Council Digital Short in 2002 starring Lucy Russell. [1]
She won the 2006 Costa Book Awards and The Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award with her debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves, which is set in Canada in the 1860s. The novel starts with the discovery of the murder of a trapper, and then follows various events that occur as the murderer is sought. As Stef Penney suffered from agoraphobia at the time of writing this novel, she did all the research in the libraries of London and never visited Canada. [2] [3]
She has subsequently written The Invisible Ones (2011) and Under A Pole Star (2016); the latter was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa Book Awards.
She has adapted three Modesty Blaise novels for BBC Radio.
Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist and short story writer. His 1993 novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.
Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park, known professionally as P. D. James, was an English novelist and life peer. Her rise to fame came with her series of detective novels featuring the police commander and poet, Adam Dalgliesh.
Barbara Gowdy, CM is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Born in Windsor, Ontario, she is the long-time partner of poet Christopher Dewdney and resides in Toronto.
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.
William Andrew Murray Boyd is a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
Anna Raymond Massey was an English actress. She won a BAFTA Best Actress Award for the role of Edith Hope in the 1986 TV adaptation of Anita Brookner's novel Hotel du Lac, a role that one of her co-stars, Julia McKenzie, has said "could have been written for her". Massey is also well known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972) as a barmaid who becomes involved with a suspected killer. She performed over one hundred character roles in British film and television.
Kate Atkinson is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She has written historical novels, detective novels and family novels, incorporating postmodern and magical realist elements into the plots. Her debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book Award, the precursor to the Costa Book Award, in 1995. The novels Life After Life and A God in Ruins won the Costa Book Award for novel in 2013 and 2015. She is also known for the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series, Case Histories.
Anthony John Horowitz is an English novelist and screenwriter specialising in mystery and suspense. His works for children and young adult readers include the Alex Rider series featuring a 14-year-old British boy who spies for MI6, The Power of Five series, and The Diamond Brothers series.
Ingrid Pitt was a Polish-British actress and writer, best known for her work in British horror cinema of the 1970s.
Resurrection, first published in 1899, was the last novel written by Leo Tolstoy. The book is the final of his major long fiction works published in his lifetime. Tolstoy intended the novel as a panoramic view of Russia at the end of the 19th century from the highest to the lowest levels of society and as an exposition of the injustice of man-made laws and the hypocrisy of the institutionalized church. The novel also explores the economic philosophy of Georgism, of which Tolstoy had become a very strong advocate towards the end of his life, and explains the theory in detail. The publication of Resurrection led to Tolstoy's excommunication by the Holy Synod from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901.
The Meaning of Night is the debut novel by author Michael Cox. Cox's book is a 600-page crime thriller novel set in Victorian England. It was one of four books picked for the shortlist for the Costa Book Awards prize for the debut novel of 2006, losing out to Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves, which went on to win the overall award for best novel of 2006.
Tahmima Anam is a Bangladeshi-born British writer, novelist and columnist. Her first novel, A Golden Age (2007), was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. Her follow-up novel, The Good Muslim, was nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is the granddaughter of Abul Mansur Ahmed and daughter of Mahfuz Anam.
The Tenderness of Wolves is a 2006 novel by Stef Penney. It won the 2006 Costa Prize for 'Book of the Year'.
Roma Tearne is a Sri Lankan-born artist and writer living and working in England. Her debut novel, Mosquito, was shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Book Awards first Novel prize.
Set in Stone is a children's fantasy novel written by Linda Newbery. It received the Costa Children's Book of the Year Prize for 2006, and was nominated for the 2007 Carnegie Medal.
Abigail Louise Morgan is a Welsh playwright and screenwriter known for her works for television, such as Sex Traffic and The Hour, and the films Brick Lane, The Iron Lady, Shame and Suffragette.
Holliday Clark Grainger, also credited as Holly Grainger, is an English screen and stage actress. Some of her prominent roles are Kate Beckett in the BAFTA award-winning children's series Roger and the Rottentrolls, Lucrezia Borgia in the Showtime series The Borgias, Robin Ellacott in the Strike series, DI/DCI Rachel Carey in the Peacock/BBC One crime drama The Capture, and Estella in Mike Newell's 2012 film adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1861 novel Great Expectations.
Chris Dolan is a Scottish novelist, poet, and playwright. He is married to Moira Dolan and they currently live in Glasgow with their children. He is a lecturer in English Literature at Glasgow Caledonian University and is Programme Leader of the master's degree programme in Television Screenwriting there.
Jack Reacher is a series of novels, novellas and short stories by British author Jim Grant under the pen name Lee Child. As of January 2022, the series includes 28 books and a short story collection. The book series chronicles the adventures of Jack Reacher, a former major in the United States Army Military Police Corps now a drifter, roaming the United States taking odd jobs and investigating suspicious and frequently dangerous situations, some of which are of a personal nature. The Reacher series has maintained a schedule of one book per year, except for 2010, when two installments were published.
Kate O'Flynn is a British actress. She is known for her performance in National Theatre's production of Port for which she received a Critics' Circle Theatre Award in 2013, as well as starring roles in plays A Taste of Honey in 2014, and The Glass Menagerie for which she was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in 2017.