Yomp is Royal Marines slang describing a long-distance loaded march carrying full kit. It was popularised by journalistic coverage in 1982 during the Falklands War. The origin of the word is unclear, and there is no evidence to suggest that it derives originally from an acronym. Various backronymic definitions have however been proposed, including "young officers marching pace", "your own marching pace" and a connection with the term yump used in rally-driving in the sense of "to leave the ground when taking a crest at speed", apparently a Scandinavian pronunciation of jump.
Maggie O'Farrell, RSL, is a novelist from Northern Ireland. Her acclaimed first novel, After You'd Gone, won the Betty Trask Award, and a later one, The Hand That First Held Mine, the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has twice been shortlisted since for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for a Heatwave in 2014 and This Must Be The Place in 2017. She appeared in the Waterstones 25 Authors for the Future. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death reached the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her novel Hamnet won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, and the fiction prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Marriage Portrait was shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages. Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.
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.
John Lewis-Stempel is an English farmer, writer, and Sunday Times Top 5 best selling author.
The Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction is a British literary award founded in 2010. At £25,000, it is one of the largest literary awards in the UK. The award was created by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, who is generally considered the originator of historical fiction with the novel Waverley in 1814.
Anuradha Roy is an Indian novelist, journalist and editor. She has written five novels: An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), The Folded Earth (2011), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), All the Lives We Never Lived (2018), and The Earthspinner (2021).
Kiran Millwood Hargrave FRSL is a British poet, playwright and novelist. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Barbara Jenkins is a Trinidadian writer, whose work since 2010 has won several international prizes, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
Raynor Winn is a British long-distance walker and writer; her first book The Salt Path was a Sunday Times bestseller in 2018.
Jay Bernard, FRSL, is a British writer, artist, film programmer, and activist from London, UK. Bernard has been a programmer at BFI Flare since 2014, co-editor of Oxford Poetry, and their fiction, non-fiction, and art has been published in many national and international magazines and newspapers.
Steve Antony is a British children's author and illustrator, who has written and illustrated seventeen picture books and two board books.
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.
Bee Journal is a 2012 poetry collection by Sean Borodale. It is written in the form of a journal and follows one colony for around one year, from the initial formation of the hive to the capture of a swarm.
The RSL Christopher Bland Prize was inaugurated by the Royal Society of Literature to encourage the work of older writers. It is awarded annually to an author of a fiction or non-fiction book who was first published when aged 50 or over. The prize is valued at £10,000 and was launched in September 2018. It is named in recognition of Sir Christopher Bland, who was 76 when his first novel was published.
Dara Seamus McAnulty is a Northern Irish naturalist, writer and environmental campaigner. He is the youngest ever winner of the RSPB Medal and received the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing in 2020 after being the youngest author to be shortlisted for the award.
Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures is a 2020 non-fiction book on mycology by British biologist Merlin Sheldrake. His first book, it was published by Random House on 12 May 2020.
Rebecca Giggs is a Perth-based Australian nonfiction writer, known for Fathoms: The World in the Whale.
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is a 2021 environmental book by Elizabeth Kolbert. The book follows many of the themes she explored in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.
The Salt Path is an upcoming British film directed by Marianne Elliott in her feature directorial debut, from a screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. It is based on the memoir of the same name by Raynor Winn. Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs will star.
