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. An author contemporary with him, Thomas Pynchon, described Mills's first novel, The Restraint of Beasts, as ""a demented, dead-pan comic wonder".
Paul Magrs is a 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 notable 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.
The airport novel represents a literary genre that is defined not so much by its plot or cast of stock characters, as by the social function it serves. Designed to meet the demands of a very specific market, airport novels are superficially engaging while not being necessarily profound as they are usually written to be more entertaining than philosophically challenging. An airport novel is typically a fairly long but fast-paced boilerplate genre-fiction novel commonly offered by airport newsstands, "read for pace and plot, not elegance of phrasing".
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 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 Award.
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, 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 and game writer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017.
Child 44 is a thriller novel by British writer Tom Rob Smith. This 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.
The AML Awards are given annually by the Association for Mormon Letters (AML) to the best work "by, for, and about Mormons." They are juried awards, chosen by a panel of judges. Citations for many of the awards can be found on the AML website.
Neil Forsyth is a Scottish author, television writer and journalist.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Manda Best is a fictional character from the BBC soap opera EastEnders, played by Josie Lawrence. Manda was introduced by executive producer Diederick Santer, and made her first appearance on 6 March 2009 and her last on 12 February 2010.
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.
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.
All the Birds in the Sky is a 2016 science fantasy novel by American writer and editor Charlie Jane Anders. It is her debut speculative fiction novel and was first published in January 2016 in the United States by Tor Books. The book is about a witch and a techno-geek, their troubled relationship, and their attempts to save the world from disaster. The publisher described the work as "blending literary fantasy and science fiction".
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.
