Georgette Heyer was an English novelist and short-story writer, in both the regency romance and detective fiction genres. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story for her younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 Heyer married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. The couple spent several years living in Tanganyika Territory and Macedonia before returning to England in 1929. After her novel These Old Shades became popular despite its release during the General Strike, Heyer determined that publicity was not necessary for good sales. For the rest of her life she refused to grant interviews, telling a friend: "My private life concerns no one but myself and my family."
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the audience to be aware they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former marriage name as A. S. Byatt, is an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been widely translated, into more than thirty languages.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
Sarah Ann Waters is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Jennifer Carolyn Robin McKinley is an American author of fantasy and children's books. Her 1984 novel The Hero and the Crown won the Newbery Medal as the year's best new American children's book.
Richard David Ellmann, FBA was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
Possession: A Romance is a 1990 best-selling novel by British writer A. S. Byatt that won the 1990 Booker Prize for Fiction. The novel explores the postmodern concerns of similar novels, which are often categorised as historiographic metafiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and metafiction.
Suzanne Finstad is a bestselling American author, biographer, journalist, producer, and lawyer.
Diane Helen Middlebrook was an American biographer, poet, and teacher. She taught feminist studies for many years at Stanford University. She wrote critically acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, and jazz musician Billy Tipton. Middlebrook was preparing a biography of the Roman poet Ovid, to be published in 2008. Her death halted that project.
A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (résumé), a biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of their life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.
Alison Weir is a British author and public historian. She primarily writes about the history of English royal women and families, in the form of biographies that explore their historical setting. She has also written numerous works of historical fiction.
Jennifer Sheila Uglow is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.
Debby Applegate is an American historian and biographer. She is the author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age and The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Johan Harstad is a Norwegian novelist, short story writer, playwright and graphic designer. He lives in Oslo.
The Virgin in the Garden is a 1978 realist novel by English novelist A. S. Byatt. Set during the same year as the coronation of Elizabeth II, the novel revolves around a play about Elizabeth I of England. The novel has strong use of symbolism, which the New York Times called "overloaded", that points towards Elizabeth I. The novel is the first of the Frederica Potter quartet, followed by Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002).
An unauthorized biography is a biography written without the subject's permission or input. The term is usually restricted to biographies written within the subject's lifetime or shortly after their death; as such, it is not applied to biographies of historical figures written long after their deaths.
Nicholas Wright Gillham was an American geneticist who served as the James B. Duke Professor of Biology at Duke University. In addition to his scientific research, he is known for his 2001 biography of Francis Galton, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics.
Yasser Usman is an Indian television journalist, news presenter, and biographer. Born in Moradabad, Yasser began his career by working as a television presenter and was awarded the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for his contribution. Usman has been recognised by the media as one of India's most successful film biographers
