William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is British writer Jon McGregor's first novel, which was first published by Bloomsbury in 2002. It portrays a day in the life of a suburban British street, with the plot alternately following the lives of the street's various inhabitants. All but one person's viewpoint is described in the third person, and the narrative uses a flowing grammatical style which mimics their thought processes.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Philip Michael Hensher FRSL is an English novelist, critic and journalist.
The Painted Veil is a 1934 American drama directed by Richard Boleslawski and starring Greta Garbo. The film was produced by Hunt Stromberg for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Based on the 1925 novel The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham, with a screenplay by John Meehan, Salka Viertel, and Edith Fitzgerald, the film is about a woman who accompanies her new husband to China while he conducts medical research. Feeling neglected by her husband, the woman soon falls in love with a handsome diplomatic attaché. The film score was by Herbert Stothart, the cinematography by William H. Daniels, the art direction by Cedric Gibbons, and the costume design by Adrian. The film earned $1,658,000 at the box office.
The Casuarina Tree is a collection of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, set in the Federated Malay States during the 1920s. It was first published by the UK publishing house Heinemann on September 2, 1926. The first American edition was published on September 17, 1926 by George H. Doran. It was re-published by Collins in London under the title The Letter: Stories of Crime. The book was published in French translation as Le Sortilège Malais (1928) and in Spanish as Extremo Oriente (1945).
Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian novelist who writes in English. He published his first novel, The Gift of Rain, in 2007. He is best known for his 2012 book The Garden of Evening Mists which won the Man Asian Literary Prize and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, making Tan the first Malaysian to be recognised by all three awards.
The Gift of Rain is the first novel by Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng. It was published in 2007 by Myrmidon Books in the United Kingdom and the following year by Weinstein Books in the United States, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year.
Alice Albinia is an English journalist and author whose first book, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River (2008), won several awards.
Jane Rogers is a British novelist, editor, scriptwriter, lecturer, and teacher. She is best known for her novels Mr. Wroe's Virgins and The Voyage Home. In 1994 Rogers was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Francis Spufford FRSL is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fiction to fiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Suzette Mayr is a Canadian novelist who has written five critically acclaimed novels, and who is currently a professor at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Arts. Mayr's works have both won and been nominated for several literary awards.
The Ethel Proudlock case refers to a 1911 shooting by Proudlock, her trial for murder, and the cause célèbre scandalising British colonial society in Kuala Lumpur, Federated Malay States it created.
Michael Arditti is an English writer. He has written twelve novels, including Easter, The Enemy of the Good, Jubilate and The Breath of Night, and also a collection of short stories, Good Clean Fun. His most recent novel, The Anointed, was published in April 2020. He is a prolific literary critic and an occasional broadcaster for the BBC. Much of his work explores issues of spirituality and sexuality. He has been described by Philip Pullman as "our best chronicler of the rewards and pitfalls of present-day faith".
The 2012 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 16 October 2012. A longlist of twelve titles was announced on 25 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 11 September. The jury was chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, accompanied by literary critics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon, historian and biographer Amanda Foreman, and Dan Stevens, actor of Downton Abbey fame with a background English Literature studies. The jury was faced with the controversy of the 2011 jury, whose approach had been seen as overly populist. Whether or not as a response to this, the 2012 jury strongly emphasised the value of literary quality and linguistic innovation as criteria for inclusion.
The Garden of Evening Mists is the second English-language novel by Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng, first published in November 2011. The book follows protagonist Teoh Yun Ling, who was a prisoner of the Japanese during the World War II, and later became a judge overseeing war crimes cases. Seeking after the war to create a garden in memory of her sister, who was imprisoned with her but did not survive, she ends up serving as an apprentice to a Japanese gardener in Cameron Highlands for several months during the Malayan Emergency. As the story begins, years later, she is trying to make sense of her life and experiences.
Ah King is a collection of short stories set in the Federated Malay States and elsewhere in Southeast Asia during the 1920s by W. Somerset Maugham. It was first published by the UK publishing house, Heinemann, in September 1933; the first American edition was published on November 8 of the same year by Doubleday Doran, New York. The book was published in French translation as La Femme dans la Jungle (1935) and in Spanish as Ah King, mi criado china (1946).
Jessie Greengrass is a British author. She won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her debut short story collection.
Nell Stevens is a British writer of memoirs and fiction. She is an assistant professor in the University of Warwick School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, where she teaches on the Warwick Writing Programme and lists her research interests as "historical fiction, autofiction, life writing, hybrid forms".
Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel is a collection of 12 works of short fiction and a novella by John Updike. The volume was published in 2000 by Alfred A. Knopf.
