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".
Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was an innovative English novelist. His eight short novels, partly inspired by the London aesthetes of the 1890s, especially Oscar Wilde, consist largely of dialogue, with references to religion, social-climbing, and sexuality.
David Peace is an English writer. Best known for his UK-set novels Red Riding Quartet (1999–2002), GB84 (2004), The Damned Utd (2006), and Red or Dead (2013), Peace was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in their 2003 list. His books often deal with themes of mental breakdown or derangement in the face of extreme circumstances. In an interview with David Mitchell, he stated: "I was drawn to writing about individuals and societies in moments that are often extreme, and often at times of defeat, be they personal or broader, or both. I believe that in such moments, during such times, in how we react and how we live, we learn who we truly are, for better or worse."
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.
Nicholas Laird is a Northern Irish novelist and poet.
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Maggie Mary Gee is an English novelist. In 2012, she became a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Joseph O'Neill is an Irish novelist and non-fiction writer. O'Neill's novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
Sarah Hall is an English novelist and short story writer. Her critically acclaimed second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was nominated for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Cumbria.
Andrés Neuman is an Argentine writer, poet, translator, columnist and blogger.
Michael Ogilvie Imlah, better known as Mick Imlah, was a Scottish poet and editor.
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.
Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on Granta magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Her 2021 novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, making her the first British Somali novelist to get this honour. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including The Guardian, and contributed poetry to the anthology New Daughters of Africa. Mohamed was also a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London until 2021. She will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in Spring 2022.
The Stranger's Child is the fifth novel by Alan Hollinghurst, first published in June 2011. The book tells the story of a minor poet, Cecil Valance, who is killed in the First World War. In 1913, he visits a Cambridge friend, George Sawle, at the latter's home in Stanmore, Middlesex. While there Valance writes a poem entitled "Two Acres", about the Sawles' house and addressed, ambiguously, either to George himself or to George's younger sister, Daphne. The poem goes on to become famous and the novel follows the changing reputation of Valance and his poetry in the following decades.
Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
Sara Baume is an Irish novelist. She was named on Granta magazine's "Best of Young British Novelists" list 2023.
Sophie Mackintosh is a British novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, was nominated for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, compiled every 10 years since 1983, identifying the 20 most significant British novelists aged under 40.
