Susanna Jones (born 1967) is a British writer. Her debut novel, The Earthquake Bird won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize a Betty Trask Award and the Crime Writers' Association John Creasy Dagger. [1]
Born in Hull, Jones spent her childhood in Hornsea in the East Riding of Yorkshire. [2] Her father was a University Professor and her mother a teacher then School Inspector. [3] She studied drama at Royal Holloway University in London where she became interested in Japanese culture through her study of Noh theatre. After graduating in 1988 [4] she then travelled to Japan where she taught English in Nagoya on the JET Programme, spent two years in Turkey then returned to Japan in 1994 where she lived and worked in Chiba. [3] Later moving to Tokyo where she worked as a radio script editor. [1] and presenter for NHK Radio. [2] Whilst in Tokyo she started writing her first novel, which was set in the city. In 1996 she studied for an MA in Novel Writing at the University of Manchester and taught Fiction Writing at the University of Exeter from 2003 to 2005. [4] She now lives near Brighton [3] and lectures in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. [2]
Carol Ann Shields, was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.
Anglo-Welsh literature and Welsh writing in English are terms used to describe works written in the English language by Welsh writers. It has been recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century. The need for a separate identity for this kind of writing arose because of the parallel development of modern Welsh-language literature; as such it is perhaps the youngest branch of English-language literature in the British Isles.
Angela Olive Pearce, who published under the name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is best known for her book The Bloody Chamber, which was published in 1979. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Susanna Moore is an American writer and teacher. Born in Pennsylvania but raised in Hawaii, Moore worked as a model and script reader in Los Angeles and New York City before beginning her career as a writer. Her first novel, My Old Sweetheart, published in 1982, earned a PEN Hemingway nomination, and won the Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She followed this with The Whiteness of Bones in 1989, and her third novel, Sleeping Beauties, in 1993. All three of these novels were set in Hawaii and charted dysfunctional family relationships.
Dame Hermione Lee, is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and professorial fellow of New College. She is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Nina Bawden CBE, FRSL, JP was an English novelist and children's writer. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987 and the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. She is one of very few who have both served as a Booker judge and made a Booker shortlist as an author. She was a recipient of the Golden PEN Award.
Kiran Desai is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.
Natsuo Kirino is the pen name of Mariko Hashioka, a Japanese novelist and a leading figure in the recent boom of female writers of Japanese detective fiction.
Leila Aboulela is a fiction writer of Sudanese origin, who lives in Great Britain and writes in English. She grew up in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, and has mainly lived in Aberdeen, Scotland, since 2012.
Stella Tillyard FRSL is an English author and historian, educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1999 her bestselling book Aristocrats was made into a six-part series for BBC1/Masterpiece Theatre sold to over 20 countries. Winner of the Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Longman/History Today Prize and the Fawcett Prize, she has taught at Harvard; the University of California, Los Angeles; Birkbeck, London and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, London. She is a visiting professor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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.
Yaeko Nogami was the pen-name of a novelist of the Shōwa period Japan. Her maiden name was Kotegawa Yae.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet and novelist. 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.
Min Jin Lee is a Korean American author and journalist based in Manhattan. Her work frequently deals with Korean and Korean American topics. She is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017).
Ann Cleeves is an English crime-writer. In 2006 she won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger for her novel Raven Black. Cleeves was born in Herefordshire and brought up in north Devon where she attended Barnstaple Grammar School; she studied English at the University of Sussex but dropped out and then took up various jobs including cook at the Fair Isle bird observatory, auxiliary coastguard, probation officer, library outreach worker and child care officer. She lives in Whitley Bay, and is widowed with two daughters.
Michelene Dinah Wandor, known from 1963 to at least 1979 as Michelene Victor, is an English playwright, critic, broadcaster, poet, lecturer, and musician.
Kate Williams is a British historian, author, and television presenter. She is a Professor of Public Engagement with History at the University of Reading.
The Earthquake Bird is the debut novel by British author Susanna Jones published in 2001. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, a Betty Trask Award, and the Crime Writers' Association John Creasy Dagger. The novel was later adapted by Wash Westmoreland into a film called the Earthquake Bird, which was released by Netflix in November 2019.
Clara Tomas was a Canadian academic. A longtime professor of English at York University, she was one of the first academics to devote her work specifically to the study of Canadian literature, and was especially known for her studies of Canadian women writers such as Anna Brownell Jameson, Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Margaret Laurence.
Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian-born short story and novel writer working in London. Her stories incorporate magic realism and also make use of her West African heritage. Her first novel, Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask Award in 2016, and her story "Grace Jones" won the 2020 Caine Prize for African Writing. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.