Susie Boyt FRSL (born January 1969) is a British novelist.
Boyt is the daughter of Suzy Boyt and artist Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. Boyt was educated at Channing and at Camden School for Girls and read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford, graduating in 1992. As a student her boyfriend died in a climbing accident. She later trained as a bereavement counsellor. [1]
Working variously at a PR agency, and a literary agency, she completed her first novel, The Normal Man, which was published in 1995 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. She returned to university to do a Masters in Anglo American Literary Relations at University College London studying the works of Henry James and the poet John Berryman.[ citation needed ]
To date, she has published seven novels, the most recent being Loved and Missed (2021). In 2008, she published My Judy Garland Life, a layering of biography, hero-worship and self-help. Her journalism includes a column in the weekend Life & Arts section of the Financial Times. She is married to Tom Astor, a film producer. They live with their two daughters in London.[ citation needed ]
Boyt was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. [2]
Judith Blume is an American writer of children's, young adult, and adult fiction. Blume began writing in 1959 and has published more than 26 novels. Among her best-known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (1970), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Deenie (1973), and Blubber (1974). Blume's books have significantly contributed to children's and young adult literature. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
The Hotel New Hampshire is a 1981 coming of age novel by American-Canadian writer John Irving, his fifth published novel.
Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Monica Ali is a British writer of Bangladeshi and English descent. In 2003, she was selected as one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" by Granta based on her unpublished manuscript; her debut novel, Brick Lane, was published later that year. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name. She has also published four other novels. Her fifth novel, Love Marriage, was published by Virago Press in February 2022 and became an instant Sunday Times bestseller.
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.
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.
Susan Fletcher is a British novelist.
Heather O'Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was subsequently selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by singer-songwriter John K. Samson. Lullabies won the competition. The book also won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for eight other major awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for International Dublin Literary Award.
Amanda Whittington is an English dramatist who has written over 30 plays for theatre and radio. Her work is widely performed by companies across the UK, with recent productions at Hull Truck, Oldham Coliseum, New Vic Theatre and Nottingham Playhouse. Be My Baby is a popular GCSE and 'A' level choice in English Literature and Theatre Studies. She currently has two titles in Nick Hern Books' Top Ten Most Performed Plays. In 2017, she was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy by Publication at the University of Huddersfield.
Shena Mackay FRSL is a Scottish novelist born in Edinburgh. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for The Orchard on Fire, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2003 for Heligoland.
Grace Dent is a British columnist, broadcaster and author. She is a restaurant critic for The Guardian and from 2011 to 2017 wrote a restaurant column for the Evening Standard. She is a regular critic on the BBC's MasterChef UK and has appeared on Channel 4's television series Very British Problems.
Alice Pung is an Australian writer, editor and lawyer. Her books include the memoirs Unpolished Gem (2006), Her Father's Daughter (2011) and the novel Laurinda (2014).
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry. Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002). Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.
Louisa Young is a British novelist, songwriter, short-story writer, biographer and journalist, whose work has appeared in 32 languages. By 2023 she had published seven novels under her own name and five with her daughter, the actor Isabel Adomakoh Young, under the pen name Zizou Corder. Her eleventh novel, Devotion, appeared in June 2016. She has also written three non-fiction books, The Book of the Heart and A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Her memoir, You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol, is an account of her relationship with the composer Robert Lockhart and of his alcoholism. Her most recent novel, Twelve Months and a Day, was published in June 2022 in the UK, and in the US in January 2023 (Putnam).
Imachibundu Oluwadara Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Patrice Lawrence MBE, FRSL is a British writer and journalist, who has published fiction both for adults and children. Her writing has won awards including the Waterstones Children's Book Prize for Older Children and The Bookseller YA Book Prize. In 2021, she won the Jhalak Prize's inaugural children's and young adult category for her book Eight Pieces of Silva (2020).
Irenosen Iseghohi Okojie FRSL is a Nigerian-born short story and novel writer working in London. Her stories incorporate speculative elements 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.
Girl in White Cotton is the debut novel by Avni Doshi, an American writer of Indian origin. Doshi wrote the novel over the course of seven years. It tells the story of a troubled mother-daughter relationship in Pune, India. The novel was first published in India in August 2019. It was published in the United Kingdom under the title Burnt Sugar in July 2020.
Susan Elizabeth Steiner was an English novelist and journalist best known for her three crime thriller novels set in Cambridgeshire, and whose central character is DS Manon Bradshaw. The first novel in the series was Missing, Presumed and was published in 2016. This was followed by Persons Unknown, published in 2017, and Remain Silent, published in 2020.