Dame Emma Thompson is a British actress, screenwriter, producer, activist, author, and comedian. One of Britain's most acclaimed actresses, she is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, a British Academy Television Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Waterstones, formerly Waterstone's, is a British book retailer that operates 283 shops, mainly in the United Kingdom and also other nearby countries. As of February 2014, it employs around 3,500 staff in the UK and Europe. An average-sized Waterstones shop sells a range of approximately 30,000 individual books, as well as stationery and other related products.
HMV is a UK-based music and film retailer. The first HMV-branded store was opened by the Gramophone Company on Oxford Street in 1921, and the HMV name was also used for television and radio sets manufactured from the 1930s onwards. The retail side of the business began to expand in the 1960s, and in 1998 was divested from EMI, the successor to the Gramophone Company, to form what would become HMV Group.
Sheridan Smith OBE is an English actress, singer and presenter. Smith came to prominence after playing a variety of characters on sitcoms such as The Royle Family (1998–2012), Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps (2001–2009), Gavin & Stacey (2008–2010), and Benidorm (2009). She played the role of Joey Ross on the drama series Jonathan Creek (2009–2013) and went on to receive acclaim for starring in a succession of television dramas, such as Mrs Biggs (2012), Cilla (2014), The C Word (2015), Black Work (2015), and The Moorside (2017). Her feature film credits include Tower Block (2012), Quartet (2012), and The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016).
Ruth Alexandra Elisabeth Jones is a Welsh actress, comedian, writer and producer. She co-wrote and co-starred in the award-winning BBC sitcom Gavin & Stacey.
James Kimberley Corden is an English actor, comedian, singer, writer, producer, and television host. In the United States, he is best known as the host of The Late Late Show with James Corden, a late-night talk show that has been on CBS since 2015. In the United Kingdom, he is best known for co-writing and starring in the critically-acclaimed BBC sitcom Gavin & Stacey.
The Waterstones Children's Book Prize is an annual award given to a work of children's literature published during the previous year. First awarded in 2005, the purpose of the prize is "to uncover hidden talent in children's writing" and is therefore open only to authors who have published no more than three books.
Jessica Kathryn Burton is an English author and actress. As of 2021, she has published three novels, The Miniaturist, The Muse, and The Confession, and a book for children, The Restless Girls. All three novels were Sunday Times best-sellers, with both The Miniaturist and The Muse reaching no. 1, New York Times best-sellers, and Radio 4's Books at Bedtime. Collectively her novels have been published in almost 40 languages. Her short stories have been published in Harpers Bazaar US and Stylist.
Katherine Frances Brand, known as Katy Brand, is an English actress, comedian and writer, known for her ITV2 series Katy Brand's Big Ass Show and for Comedy Lab Slap on Channel 4.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo,, is a British author and academic. Her eighth book, the novel, Girl, Woman, Other, won the Booker Prize in 2019, making her the first black woman and the first black British person to win it. In 2020 she won the British Book Awards: Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year, as well as the Indie Book Award for Fiction as well as many other awards. The novel was one of Barack Obama's 19 Favourite Books of 2019 and Roxane Gay's Favourite Book of 2019. In June 2020 she became the first woman of colour and the first black British writer to get to number 1 in the UK paperback fiction charts, where she held the top spot for five weeks. There are over 50 foreign language translations of Evaristo's books in process. Evaristo's writing also includes short fiction, drama, poetry, essays, literary criticism, and projects for stage and radio. Two of her books, The Emperor's Babe (2001) and Hello Mum (2010), have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 dramas. Her ninth book, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up is published by Penguin UK October 2021 and Grove Atlantic USA (2022).
Eleanor Catton is a Canadian-born New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
The Waterstones 11 was a literary book prize aimed at promoting debut authors, run and curated by British bookseller Waterstones. It ran from 2011-2013. The list of 11 authors are selected from a list of 100 authors submitted by publishers. The prize, established in 2011, has included Orange Prize winner Tea Obreht's novel The Tiger's Wife, Man Booker Prize nominee Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman and the winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction, The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen.
Nosy Crow is an independent children's publisher, based in London. The company was founded in 2010 by Kate Wilson, formerly MD of Macmillan Children’s Books and Group MD of Scholastic UK Ltd, Adrian Soar, formerly Book Publishing CEO of Macmillan Publishers, and Camilla Reid, formerly Editorial Director of Campbell Books. In 2020, the company was named Independent Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards. As of 2021, Nosy Crow is the UK's 11th largest children's publisher, according to Nielsen BookScan data.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave is a British poet, playwright and novelist.
Gavin Extence is an English writer. Extence won the Waterstones 11 literary prize for his first book The Universe Versus Alex Woods (2013). He has a PhD in Film studies, is married, has a daughter and is also a keen chess player.
Candy Gourlay is a Filipino author based in the United Kingdom who has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Her debut novel Tall Story (2010) won the National Children's Book Award of the Philippines in 2012 and the Crystal Kite Award for Europe in 2011. Tall Story was shortlisted for 13 prizes, notably: the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the Branford Boase Award, the Blue Peter Book Award and the UKLA Children's Book Prize. It was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Her second novel Shine (2013) was longlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and won the Crystal Kite Award for the British Isles in 2014. Bone Talk (2018) was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and the CILIP Carnegie Medal.
Holly Smale is a British writer. She wrote the Geek Girl series. The first book in the series won the 2014 Waterstones Children's Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2013. The final book, Forever Geek, was published by HarperCollins in March 2017.
Sam Byers is a British novelist. He was born in Bury St Edmunds and now lives in Norwich, where he studied at the University of East Anglia.
Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian novelist and essayist. She has written numerous essays and five novels, including Station Eleven (2014) and The Glass Hotel (2020). Station Eleven is scheduled to be turned into a miniseries by HBO sometime in 2021. The novel has been translated into 33 languages. The Glass Hotel was translated into 20 languages and selected by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books from the year 2020.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2016.
