Witi Tame Ihimaera-Smiler is a New Zealand author. Raised in the small town of Waituhi, he decided to become a writer as a teenager after being convinced that Māori people were ignored or mischaracterised in literature. He was the first Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, with Pounamu, Pounamu (1972), and the first to publish a novel, with Tangi (1973). After his early works, he took a ten-year break from writing, during which he focused on editing an anthology of Māori writing in English.
Magnus Mills is an English fiction writer and bus driver. He is best known for his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and praised by Thomas Pynchon.
Paul Magrs is an English writer and lecturer. He was born in Jarrow, England, and now lives in Manchester with his partner, author and lecturer Jeremy Hoad.
Alan Warner is a Scottish novelist who grew up in Connel, near Oban. His novels include Morvern Callar and The Sopranos – the latter being the inspiration for the play Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour and its subsequent film adaptation, Our Ladies.
Sebastian Charles Faulks is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He has also published novels with a contemporary setting, most recently A Week in December (2009) and Paris Echo, (2018) and a James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care (2008), as well as a continuation of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (2013). He was a team captain on BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff.
V for Vendetta is a 2005 dystopian political action film directed by James McTeigue from a screenplay by the Wachowskis. It is based on the 1988–89 DC Vertigo Comics limited series of the same title by Alan Moore, David Lloyd, and Tony Weare. The film, set in a future where a fascist totalitarian regime has subjugated the UK, centres on V, an anarchist and masked freedom fighter who attempts to ignite a revolution through elaborate terrorist acts, and on Evey Hammond, a young woman caught up in V's mission. Stephen Rea portrays a detective leading a desperate quest to stop V.
Andrew O'Hagan is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Alan Bissett is an author and playwright from Hallglen, an area of Falkirk in Scotland. After the publication of his first two novels, Boyracers and The Incredible Adam Spark, he became known for his different take on Scots dialect writing, evolving a style specific to Falkirk, suffused with popular culture references and socialist politics. He also applied to be rector of the University of Glasgow in 2014.
Manda Scott is a former Scottish veterinary surgeon who is now a novelist, blogger, podcaster, columnist and occasional broadcaster. Born and educated in Glasgow, Scotland, she trained at the University of Glasgow School of Veterinary Medicine and now lives and works in Shropshire.
Naomi Alderman is an English novelist, game writer, and television executive producer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Studios.
Andrew Crumey is a novelist and former literary editor of the Edinburgh newspaper Scotland on Sunday. His works of literary fiction incorporate elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction and Menippean satire. Brian Stableford has called them "philosophical fantasies". The Spanish newspaper El Mundo called Crumey "one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years."
Child 44 is a 2008 thriller novel by British writer Tom Rob Smith. It is the first novel in a trilogy featuring former MGB Agent Leo Demidov, who investigates a series of gruesome child murders in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union.
Neil Forsyth is a Scottish author, television writer and journalist. He has written and created a number of British television shows including The Gold, Guilt, and Bob Servant Independent, and has won numerous television awards.
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.
Walking to Hollywood is a 2010 novel by writer and media personality Will Self. Self describes the novel as 'a cross between a comical farce and an intense misery memoir'. The novel is published by Bloomsbury in the U.K. and Grove Press in the U.S. It was mainly conceived whilst Self himself walked to Hollywood from Los Angeles Airport.
And the Land Lay Still is the fourth novel by Scottish novelist and poet James Robertson. Upon publication in 2010 it was widely praised for its breadth of exploration of Scottish society in the latter half of the 20th century.
1906 is a 2004 American historical novel written by James Dalessandro. With a 38-page outline and six finished chapters, he pitched it around Hollywood in 1998 for a film by the same name, based upon events surrounding the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.
The Secret Knowledge (2013) is the seventh novel by Scottish writer Andrew Crumey. It was his first since returning to his original UK publisher Dedalus Books, and was awarded a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Part of the writing was done while the author was visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. It was longlisted for the Guardian's "Not the Booker" prize.
Rob Magnuson Smith is a novelist, short story writer, journalist, and university lecturer. A dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, Smith currently resides in Cornwall.
Our Ladies is a 2019 Scottish coming-of-age comedy-drama film produced and directed by Michael Caton-Jones, who co-wrote the screenplay with Alan Sharp, based on Alan Warner's 1998 novel The Sopranos. The film stars Tallulah Greive, Abigail Lawrie, Rona Morison, Sally Messham, Marli Siu, and Eve Austin.
