165 articles
A. J. Cronin
A. J. Cronin, born Archibald Joseph Cronin, was a Scottish physician turned novelist whose 1937 bestseller The Citadel is credited with contributing to the founding of Britain's National Health Service.
A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt (Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, née Drabble, 1936–2023), British novelist and critic; sister of Margaret Drabble; won the 1990 Booker Prize for Possession and wrote the Frederica Quartet.
Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) was a British writer from Nottingham whose first two books, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, defined the postwar working-class novel.
Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray (1934–2019), Scottish writer and artist from Glasgow, author of Lanark, 1982 Janine, and Poor Things (Whitbread winner), muralist of the Òran Mór ceiling and author of the motto 'Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation'.
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963), British novelist and essayist, author of Brave New World; moved from satirical novels of ideas to mysticism, mescalin writings, and Hollywood screenwriting.
Amelia Edwards
Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831-1892), English novelist, travel writer, and Egyptologist; author of A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), co-founder of the Egypt Exploration Fund (1882), and benefactor of UCL's first Egyptology chair.
Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy (1956–2019), British novelist and Windrush-generation daughter, wrote Small Island (Orange Prize, Whitbread Book of the Year) and The Long Song (Booker shortlist, Walter Scott Prize).
Angela Carter
Angela Carter (1940-1992) was an English novelist and journalist known for The Bloody Chamber (1979), feminist fairy-tale rewritings, The Sadeian Woman, and magic-realist novels like Nights at the Circus and Wise Children.
Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë (1820–1849), youngest Brontë sister, English novelist and poet writing as Acton Bell; author of Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), suppressed by Charlotte after her death.
Anne Enright
Anne Enright is an Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist who won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering and was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction.
Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Anthony Burgess Wilson, was an English novelist, critic, and composer who wrote 33 novels, most famously A Clockwork Orange (1962).
Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), English Victorian novelist and Post Office official; author of 47 novels, the Barsetshire and Palliser novel-sequences, and the pillar box; famed for his 5:30 a.m., 250-words-per-quarter-hour writing routine.
Arnold Bennett
Arnold Bennett (Enoch Arnold Bennett, 1867-1931), English novelist, playwright and journalist of the Staffordshire Potteries, author of The Old Wives' Tale, the Clayhanger trilogy and the Five Towns fiction, attacked by Virginia Woolf and later reappraised.
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), Hungarian-British novelist and science writer, author of Darkness at Noon and The Act of Creation; communism, Spanish Civil War imprisonment, parapsychology bequest at Edinburgh.
Ashani Lewis
Ashani Lewis is a British writer whose debut novel, Winter Animals (2024), won the 2025 Betty Trask Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award; her story collection Everest followed in 2024.
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym, born Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (1913 to 1980), was an English novelist of comic manners about unmarried women and Anglican clergy, revived in 1977 after sixteen years unpublished.
Benjamin Wood (writer)
Benjamin Wood (born 1981) is a British novelist, author of The Bellwether Revivals, The Ecliptic, and the Booker-longlisted Seascraper (2025); not the academic or historian of the same name.
Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo is a British writer whose work spans fiction, verse fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood's winning novel, making.
Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) was an English novelist known for short, darkly comic fiction; she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, more than anyone without winning.
Brian Moore (novelist)
Brian Moore (1921-1999), Belfast-born novelist also published as Bernard Mara and Michael Bryan, wrote some twenty novels including The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Black Robe, and Lies of Silence, winning two Governor General's Awards and three Booker shortlistings; Graham Greene called him his favorite living novelist.
C. P. Snow
C. P. Snow (Charles Percy Snow) was an English novelist and physical chemist known for the Strangers and Brothers series and the 1959 "two cultures" lecture.
Carys Davies
Carys Davies, Welsh novelist and short story writer, author of West, The Mission House, and Clear; winner of the 2025 Ondaatje Prize, Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, Wales Book of the Year, and Frank O'Connor Short Story Award.
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens (Charles John Huffam Dickens, 1812–1870) was an English novelist and social critic, the best-selling author of his day; his works include Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol.
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) was an Anglican clergyman, novelist, and Christian Socialist who served Eversley parish for life, wrote The Water-Babies and Alton Locke, and became Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1860.
Charles Langbridge Morgan
Charles Langbridge Morgan (1894–1958) was a British novelist, dramatist, and drama critic who wrote eleven novels and served as chief theater critic of The Times from 1926 to 1939.
Charles Reade
Charles Reade (1814–1884) was an English novelist and dramatist whose fiction attacked Victorian social abuses; his historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) is regarded as his masterpiece.
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), English Victorian novelist and poet, sister of Emily and Anne; wrote Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley, and Villette as Currer Bell; subject of Gaskell's 1857 biography.
Chloe Michelle Howarth
Chloe Michelle Howarth (born 1996) is an Irish novelist from West Cork, author of Sunburn (2023), Heap Earth Upon It, and the forthcoming Aftertaste (2027), sapphic literary fiction set in rural Ireland.
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986), British-born novelist and diarist, U.S. citizen from 1946, author of Goodbye to Berlin, The Berlin Stories (basis of Cabaret), A Single Man, and Christopher and His Kind.
Christy Brown
Christy Brown (1932–1981), Irish writer, painter, and poet with cerebral palsy who controlled only his left foot; author of My Left Foot (1954) and Down All the Days (1970); subject of Jim Sheridan's 1989 Oscar-winning film.