165 articles
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 Galsworthy
John Galsworthy (1867-1933), English novelist and dramatist who first wrote as John Sinjohn; author of The Forsyte Saga (1906-1921) and the play Justice, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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.
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Irish satirist and Church of Ireland clergyman, dean of St Patrick's, Dublin; author of Gulliver's Travels (1726), A Tale of a Tub (1704), and A Modest Proposal (1729).
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski, 1857–1924), Polish-born British novelist and ex-merchant-marine captain who wrote in English, his third language; known for Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Marlow.
Joyce Cary
Joyce Cary (Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary, 1888–1957), Irish-born British novelist and former Nigerian colonial administrator, author of Mister Johnson, The Horse's Mouth, and two first-person trilogies on art and politics.
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).
Karl Ove Knausgård
Karl Ove Knausgård (born 1968) is a Norwegian author and publisher, known for the six-volume autobiographical novel Min kamp/My Struggle (2009–2011), the Seasons quartet, and the Morning Star series.
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.
Kate Roberts (author)
Kate Roberts (1891–1985) was a Welsh-language novelist and short-story writer, called 'Queen of Our Literature', best known for the 1936 quarrying novel Feet in Chains.
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.
L. P. Hartley
L. P. Hartley, full name Leslie Poles Hartley (1895–1972), was an English novelist and short-story writer whose reputation rests chiefly on The Go-Between and the Eustace and Hilda trilogy.
Lady Caroline Lamb
Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), English aristocrat and novelist, wife of future Prime Minister Lord Melbourne; famous for her 1812 affair with Byron and her scandalous 1816 roman a clef Glenarvon.
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), Anglo-Irish clergyman and novelist, author of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), famed for digressive, typographically experimental narrative and vast European influence.
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.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, pen name of Scottish writer James Leslie Mitchell (1901–1935), author of A Scots Quair; Sunset Song (1932) blends Doric, Scots and English and was voted Scotland's best loved novel in 2016.
Liam O'Flaherty
Liam O'Flaherty (Liam Ó Flaithearta, 1896–1984) was an Irish novelist and short story writer from Inis Mór, Aran Islands, author of The Informer, Famine, and the Irish-language collection Dúil, and co-founder of the first Communist Party of Ireland.
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.
Margaret Oliphant
Margaret Oliphant, known as Mrs. Oliphant, was a Scottish novelist, biographer, and historian (1828–1897) who published about 98 novels and wrote for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for nearly fifty years.
Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and children's writer whose Irish novels of 1800 to 1817, beginning with Castle Rackrent, pioneered the regional novel in English and influenced Walter Scott and Jane Austen.
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.
Max Porter (writer)
Max Porter is a British writer of hybrid prose-poetry novels: Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Lanny (2019), The Death of Francis Bacon, and Shy (2023), a former Granta Books editorial director whose fiction, marked by typographic experiment, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was Booker-longlisted.
Michael Sadleir
Michael Sadleir, born Michael Sadler, was an English novelist, publisher, and leading bibliographer of Victorian fiction; his novel Fanny by Gaslight (1940) was his most successful, and his collection went to UCLA.