Georgette Heyer was an English novelist and short-story writer, in both the Regency romance and detective fiction genres. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story conceived for her ailing younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 Heyer married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. The couple spent several years living in Tanganyika Territory and Macedonia before returning to England in 1929. After her novel These Old Shades became popular despite its release during the General Strike, Heyer determined that publicity was not necessary for good sales. For the rest of her life she refused to grant interviews, telling a friend: "My private life concerns no one but myself and my family."
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Philippa Gregory is an English historical novelist who has been publishing since 1987. The best known of her works is The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), which in 2002 won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association and has been adapted into two films.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Patricia Mary W. Barker,, Hon FBA is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres on themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. She is known for her Regeneration Trilogy, published in the 1990s, and, more recently, a series of books set during the Trojan War, starting with The Silence of the Girls in 2018.
Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award and the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2004, he won the Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst is credited with having helped gay-themed fiction to break into the literary mainstream through his seven novels since 1988.
Possession: A Romance is a 1990 best-selling novel by English writer A. S. Byatt that won the 1990 Booker Prize for Fiction. The novel explores the postmodern concerns of similar novels, which are often categorised as historiographic metafiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and metafiction.
Katharine Weber is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop and elsewhere. She held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College from 2012 to 2019.
The Biographer's Tale is a book by A. S. Byatt. The story is about a postgraduate student, Phineas G. Nanson, who decides to write a biography about an obscure biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. During the course of his research he fails to learn much about the actual subject of his biography, but discovers a lot of Destry-Scholes' unpublished research about real historical figures Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen. In the book, Byatt combines facts with fiction when recounting the lives of the three latter figures.
Philip Michael Hensher FRSL is an English novelist, critic and journalist.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat is a novel by the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch. Published in 1970, it was her thirteenth novel.
Isobel Armstrong, is a British academic. She is professor emerita of English at Birkbeck, University of London and a senior research fellow of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. She is a fellow of the British Academy. She has been a visiting scholar at many institutions, including at Princeton University in 2016-2017. She is also a published poet. Armstrong is the younger sister of writer Diana Wynne Jones.
Still Life is a 1985 novel by A. S. Byatt. The novel was published by Chatto & Windus in 1985.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
Patrick Denman Flanery is an American author and academic. As of 2023 he is a chair of creative writing at the University of Adelaide in Adelaide, South Australia. He is known for his 2012 novel, Absolution.
Elizabeth Inness-Brown is an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and contributing editor at Boulevard. She is a retired professor of English at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont and lives in South Hero, Vermont—one of three islands comprising Grand Isle County—with her husband and son. Inness-Brown has published a novel, Burning Marguerite, as well as two short story collections, titled Here and Satin Palms. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, North American Review, Boulevard, Glimmer Train, Madcap Review, and various other journals. Inness-Brown received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for Writing in 1983 and has done writing residencies at Yaddo and The Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1982, her short story "Release, Surrender" appeared in Volume VII of the Pushcart Prize.
The Time of the Angels is a philosophical novel by British novelist Iris Murdoch. First published in 1966, it was her tenth novel. The novel centres on Carel Fisher, an eccentric Anglican priest who is the rector of a London church which was destroyed by bombing during World War II. Fisher denies the existence of God and the possibility of human goodness in a post-theistic world. The novel, which has elements of Gothic fiction, received mixed reviews on its publication.
Babel Tower is a novel by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus in 1996. It was the third part in a tetralogy, following The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985) and preceding A Whistling Woman (2002). In the interval between publication of Still Life and Babel Tower, Byatt published Possession: A Romance, her best-selling novel, which won the 1990 Booker Prize.
