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Kate Summerscale | |
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| Born | 2 September 1965 London, England |
| Occupation | Writer and journalist |
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Notable works | The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House |
| Website | |
| www | |
Kate Summerscale (born 2 September 1965) [1] is an English writer and journalist.
Summerscale was brought up in Japan, England and Chile. After attending Bedales School (1978–1983), she took a double-first at Oxford University and an MA in journalism from Stanford University. [2] She lives in London with her son. [3]
She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House, [4] based on a real-life crime committed by Constance Kent and investigated by Jack Whicher, a book described in Literary Review as an altogether "deft 21st-century piece of cultural detection" which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2008. [5] Summerscale also wrote the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, about Joe Carstairs, "fastest woman on water", which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography. Her book on Whicher inspired the 2011–2014 ITV drama series, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher , written by Helen Edmundson. [6]
She worked for The Independent and from 1995 to 1996 she wrote and edited obituaries for The Daily Telegraph. [7] She also worked as literary editor of The Daily Telegraph . [8] [9] Her articles have appeared in The Guardian , The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph . [10]
She has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize in 2001. [11]
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English. The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Claire Tomalin is an English journalist and biographer, known for her biographies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft.
William Andrew Murray Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
Kate Atkinson is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She is known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series Case Histories. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 in the Novels category for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, winning again in 2013 and 2015 under its new name the Costa Book Awards.
Jacqueline Margaret Kay,, is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers (1993), Trumpet (1998) and Red Dust Road (2011). Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
The Costa Book Awards were a set of annual literary awards recognising English-language books by writers based in UK and Ireland. Originally named the Whitbread Book Awards from 1971 to 2005 after its first sponsor, the Whitbread company, then a brewery and owner of restaurant chains, it was renamed when Costa Coffee, then a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship. The companion Costa Short Story Award was established in 2012. Costa Coffee was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 2018. The awards were abruptly terminated in 2022.
Constance Emily Kent (1844–1944) was an English woman who confessed to the murder of her half-brother, Francis Saville Kent, in 1860, when she was aged 16 and he aged three. The case led to high-level pronouncements there was no longer any ancient priest-penitent privilege in England and Wales. Kent's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she was released after serving twenty years. In later life, she changed her name to Ruth Emilie Kaye, became a nurse and for twenty years was matron of a nurses' home in East Maitland, New South Wales. She lived to the age of 100.
Benedict Richard Pierce Macintyre is a British author, reviewer and columnist for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Marion Barbara 'Joe' Carstairs was a wealthy British power boat racer known for her speed, eccentric lifestyle, and gender nonconformity. In the 1920s, she was known as the ‘fastest woman on water’.
Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.
William Saville-Kent was an English marine biologist and author.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a British series of television films made by Hat Trick Productions for ITV, written by Helen Edmundson and Neil McKay. It stars Paddy Considine in the title role of detective inspector Jack Whicher of the Metropolitan Police. The first film, The Murder at Road Hill House, was based on the real-life Constance Kent murder case of 1860, as interpreted by Kate Summerscale in her 2008 book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House, which was the winner of Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2008, and was read as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in April the same year.
Bouchercon is an annual convention of creators and devotees of mystery and detective fiction. It is named in honour of writer, reviewer, and editor Anthony Boucher, who is also the inspiration for the Anthony Awards, which have been issued at the convention since 1986. This page details Bouchercon XL and the 24th Anthony Awards ceremony.
Frances Wilson is an English author, academic, and critic.
Katherine Rundell is an English author and academic. She is the author of Rooftoppers, which in 2015 won both the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and has appeared as an expert guest on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Start the Week, Poetry Please, Seriously.... and Private Passions.
Amy Stanley is an American historian of early modern Japan. In 2007, Stanley began teaching in the Department of History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Japanese history, global history, and women's/gender history. She is best known for her most book Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography, and was a finalist for both the Baillie Gifford Prize and Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Cal Flyn is a Scottish author and journalist.
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