86 articles
Flann O'Brien
Flann O'Brien was the best-known pen name of Irish novelist Brian O'Nolan (1911 to 1966), now ranked with Joyce and Beckett as a leading figure of Irish modernism.
Florence Knapp (author)
Florence Knapp is a British author whose 2025 debut novel The Names (Viking) traces three parallel life paths of a boy named Bear, Julian, or Gordon, and who previously wrote the 2018 quilting guide Flossie Teacakes' Guide to English Paper Piecing.
Hari Kunzru
Hari Kunzru (born 1969) is a British novelist and journalist, author of The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears, and Red Pill; a 2003 Granta Best Young British Novelist who refused the 2003 John Llewellyn Rhys prize and teaches at NYU.
Helen Dunmore
Helen Dunmore (1952–2017), British poet, novelist, and children's author; winner of the inaugural Orange Prize for A Spell of Winter (1996); wrote The Siege, The Betrayal, the Ingo series, and posthumous Costa-winning Inside the Wave.
Iain Banks
Iain Banks (Iain Menzies Banks, 1954–2013), Scottish novelist; literary fiction as Iain Banks, science fiction as Iain M. Banks; The Wasp Factory (1984) and the nine-novel Culture series; died 9 June 2013.
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan (born 1948, Aldershot) is a British novelist, winner of the 1998 Booker Prize for Amsterdam, shortlisted five times more, famed for Atonement and the early 'Ian Macabre' works, and author of What We Can Know (2025).
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch (1919–1999), Irish-born British novelist and philosopher, author of 26 novels including Booker winner The Sea, The Sea, and of The Sovereignty of Good; known for Platonic moral realism, attention, and unselfing.
Irvine Welsh
Irvine Welsh (born 1958, Leith, Edinburgh) is a Scottish novelist, author of Trainspotting (1993), Filth, Glue, and Skagboys; known for Edinburgh-dialect prose, the 1996 Danny Boyle film adaptation, and over 6 million books sold.
J. L. Carr
J. L. Carr (Joseph Lloyd Carr, 1912-1994), English novelist and Quince Tree Press publisher; wrote eight novels including A Month in the Country, Guardian Fiction Prize winner and 1980 Booker shortlist.
J. P. Donleavy
J. P. Donleavy (1926-2017), American-born Irish novelist, author of The Ginger Man (1955), banned in Ireland and published by Olympia Press; won a 21-year legal battle with Maurice Girodias and bought the press, settling at Levington Park, Mullingar.
Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys (Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams), Dominican-born modernist novelist (1890 or 1894–1979), author of Quartet, Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight, and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the Jane Eyre prequel that restored her fame.
Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson (born 1959, Manchester) is an English novelist and author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Whitbread first-novel winner, also known for The Passion, Written on the Body, and Frankissstein.
Jennifer Lash
Jennifer Lash (Jini Fiennes, 1938–1993), English novelist and painter, author of The Burial, The Climate of Belief, and the posthumous Blood Ties; mother of Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.
John Banville
John Banville (born 1945, Wexford, Ireland) is an Irish novelist who won the 2005 Booker Prize for The Sea and wrote crime novels as Benjamin Black, including the Quirke series, retiring that pseudonym in 2020.
John Boyne
John Boyne is an Irish novelist who has published 22 works in more than 30 years. He is most famous for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
John Fowles
John Fowles (1926–2005), English novelist of The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman; Oxford-educated, lived reclusively at Lyme Regis, wrote existentialist, metafictional bestsellers and nature non-fiction.
John McGahern
John McGahern (1934–2006) was an Irish novelist and short story writer whose spare realist fiction about rural Ireland included Amongst Women, shortlisted for the 1990 Booker Prize.
Julian Barnes
Julian Patrick Barnes, English novelist and essayist born in Leicester in 1946; author of Flaubert's Parrot and the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending; wrote crime fiction as Dan Kavanagh; final book Departure(s) (2026).
Kate Atkinson (writer)
Kate Atkinson (born 1951, York) is a British novelist, author of Whitbread winner Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the Costa-winning Life After Life and A God in Ruins, and the six Jackson Brodie crime novels adapted by the BBC as Case Histories.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro, born 1954 in Nagasaki, is a British novelist, Booker Prize winner for The Remains of the Day and 2017 Nobel Literature laureate known for unreliable narrators, memory themes, and Never Let Me Go.
Keith Waterhouse
Keith Waterhouse (1929–2009), British novelist, playwright, and Fleet Street columnist, author of Billy Liar (1959) and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, longtime collaborator of Willis Hall and Daily Mail columnist.
Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), English comic novelist, poet, and critic, author of Lucky Jim (1954); Booker Prize 1986 for The Old Devils; father of Martin Amis; knighted 1990; moved from Labour left to Thatcherite right.
Laurie Lee
Laurie Lee (Laurence Edward Alan Lee, 1914-1997), English poet and memoirist of Slad, Gloucestershire; author of Cider with Rosie (1959) and the autobiographical trilogy including A Moment of War; MBE 1952; distinct from the American actress and the Wyoming painter of the same name.
Lawrence Durrell
Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990), British novelist, poet, and travel writer born in Jullundur, India; author of The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea, 1957–60), Prospero's Cell, and Bitter Lemons; friend of Henry Miller.
Louise Kennedy (writer)
Louise Kennedy, Irish writer from Holywood near Belfast, author of Trespasses (2022) and The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac; former chef, Women's Prize shortlist, BAFTA-winning Channel 4 adaptation, lives in Sligo.
Maggie O'Farrell
Maggie O'Farrell (born 1972, Northern Ireland) is an Irish-British novelist, author of Hamnet (Women's Prize and NBCC Award 2020), the Costa-winning The Hand That First Held Mine, the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, and Land (2026).
Marcel Theroux
Marcel Theroux, British-American novelist and broadcaster, son of Paul Theroux and brother of Louis; author of Far North (National Book Award finalist), Strange Bodies (Campbell Award), and The Paperchase (Somerset Maugham Award).
Margaret Drabble
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd (born 5 June 1939, Sheffield), English novelist, biographer and editor; author of The Millstone, Jerusalem the Golden and The Radiant Way trilogy; editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature; sister of A.S. Byatt; DBE 2008.
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon (born 1962, Northampton) is an English novelist, poet, and screenwriter; author of Whitbread-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother, and Microsoap, living in Oxford.
Martin Amis
Martin Amis (1949-2023), British novelist, essayist, and memoirist, son of Kingsley Amis; author of Money, London Fields, and Time's Arrow; won the Somerset Maugham and James Tait Black prizes but never the Booker; knighted the day before his death.