Thuggee are actions and crimes carried out by Thugs, historically, organised gangs of professional robbers and murderers in India. The English word thug traces its roots to the Hindi ठग, which means 'swindler' or 'deceiver'. Related words are the verb thugna, from the Sanskrit स्थग and स्थगति. This term, describing the murder and robbery of travellers, was popular in the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent, especially the northern and eastern regions of India.
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
Granta is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story's supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, The Observer stated: "In its blend of memoirs and photojournalism, and in its championing of contemporary realist fiction, Granta has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world."
Adam Thirlwell is a British novelist. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He has twice been named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. In 2015 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an advisory editor of The Paris Review.
David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter.
Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Christopher John Offutt is an American writer. He is most widely known for his short stories and novels, but he has also published three memoirs and multiple nonfiction articles. In 2005, he had a story included in a comic book collection edited by Michael Chabon, and another in the anthology Noir. He has written episodes for the TV series True Blood and Weeds.
Alan Kent Haruf was an American novelist.
Elizabeth McCracken is an American author. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
Mark Rowlands is a Welsh writer and philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, and the author of several books on the philosophy of mind, the moral status of non-human animals, and cultural criticism. He is known within academic philosophy for his work on the animal mind and is one of the principal architects of the view known as vehicle externalism, or the extended mind, the view that thoughts, memories, desires and beliefs can be stored outside the brain and the skull. His works include Animal Rights (1998), The Body in Mind (1999), The Nature of Consciousness (2001), Animals Like Us (2002), and a personal memoir, The Philosopher and the Wolf (2008).
Daniel Alarcón is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.
Timothy Birdsall was an English cartoonist.
Sigrid Maria Elisabet Rausing is a Swedish philanthropist, anthropologist and publisher. She is the founder of the Sigrid Rausing Trust, one of the United Kingdom's largest philanthropic foundations, and owner of Granta magazine and Granta Books.
Julian Baggini is a philosopher, journalist and the author of over 20 books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is co-founder of The Philosophers' Magazine and has written for numerous international newspapers and magazines. In addition to writing on the subject of philosophy he has also written books on atheism, secularism and the nature of national identity. He is a patron of Humanists UK.
William McPherson was an American writer and journalist. He is the author of two novels, Testing the Current and To the Sargasso Sea, and many articles, essays, and book reviews. McPherson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1977.
Philip Duncan Edwards is an English former professional cricketer. He was born at Minster on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent in 1984.
Eleanor Catton is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Born in Canada, Catton moved to New Zealand as a child and grew up in Christchurch. She completed a master's degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master's thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author ever to win the prize and only the second New Zealander. It was subsequently adapted into a television miniseries, with Catton as screenwriter. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.
David Seabrook was a British crime writer and journalist.
Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer. Marra has won numerous awards for his short stories, as well as his first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which was a New York Times best seller.
Sarah Moss is an English writer and academic. She has published six novels, as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin's School of English, Drama and Film in the Republic of Ireland with effect from September 2020.
