165 articles
Missouri Williams
Missouri Williams is an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, and editor living in London, known for The Doloriad (2022) and the Booker Prize-longlisted second novel The Vivisectors (2026).
Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark (1918-2006), Scottish poet and novelist born Muriel Sarah Camberg, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; 22 novels, Booker shortlistee, Catholic convert, war propaganda worker, lived in Tuscany, DBE 1993.
Nancy Mitford
Nancy Mitford (1904–1973), English novelist and biographer, eldest of the six Mitford sisters; author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, popularizer of U and non-U, and writer of Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King.
Naomi Ishiguro
Naomi Ishiguro (born 1992), British author and daughter of Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro; wrote Escape Routes (2020), Common Ground (2021), and the anime-inspired fantasy The Rainshadow Orphans (2026).
Natasha Brown (author)
Natasha Brown (born 1990, London) is a British novelist, author of Assembly (2021) and Universality (2025); Cambridge maths graduate, former finance worker, Granta Best of Young British Novelist 2023, Booker-longlisted.
Neil M. Gunn
Neil M. Gunn (1891-1973), born Dunbeath, Caithness, was a Scottish novelist of the interwar Scottish Literary Renaissance; a former Customs and Excise officer, his Highland River (1937) won the James Tait Black Prize and The Silver Darlings (1941) was a bestseller.
Nicholas Mosley
Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale (1923–2017), English novelist and biographer, eldest son of fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; author of Accident, Impossible Object (first Booker shortlist), Hopeful Monsters (Whitbread 1990), and his father's two-volume biography.
Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby (born 1957), English novelist and screenwriter, author of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down; twice Oscar-nominated for An Education and Brooklyn; not the sculptor born 1980.
Olivia Manning
Olivia Mary Manning (1908–1980), British novelist of the Fortunes of War sequence, the Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy, based on her wartime flight with husband Reggie Smith through Bucharest, Athens, Cairo, and Jerusalem.
P. G. Wodehouse
P. G. Wodehouse, born Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, was an English comic novelist (1881–1975) who created Jeeves and Bertie Wooster and wrote more than seventy novels and hundreds of short stories.
Pat Barker
Pat Barker (Patricia Barker, born 1943) is a British novelist, author of Union Street and the Regeneration trilogy; The Ghost Road won the 1995 Booker Prize, The Eye in the Door the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize.
Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Fitzgerald, born Penelope Knox (1916–2000), was an English novelist and biographer who won the 1979 Booker Prize for Offshore and the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower.
Political views of J. K. Rowling
Political views of J.K. Rowling: the British author's Labour donation of £1m in 2008, opposition to Scottish independence via £1m to Better Together, Remain campaigning in 2016, and her post-2019 stance on sex and gender, including the J.K. Rowling Women's Fund and For Women Scotland funding.
Polly Samson
Polly Samson (born 1962, London) is an English novelist and lyricist, wife of David Gilmour, author of A Theatre for Dreamers and The Kindness, and lyricist on four number-one albums including The Division Bell.
Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk (born 1967, Saskatoon) is a Canadian-born British novelist and memoirist, author of the Outline trilogy, Second Place, Parade, and Life of M, known for autofiction that dismantles character.
Rebecca Godfrey
Rebecca Margot Godfrey (1967-2022), Canadian novelist and journalist, author of The Torn Skirt and the award-winning true-crime work Under the Bridge on the Reena Virk case; her final novel Peggy was completed posthumously by Leslie Jamison.
Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle (born 1958), Irish novelist of working-class Dublin, author of the Barrytown Trilogy, Booker Prize winner 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and Fighting Words co-founder.
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), English writer born in Bombay, Nobel laureate 1907 and first English-language winner; author of The Jungle Book, Kim, Just So Stories, and the poem If, famed for imperial themes and contested reputation.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013) was a German-born novelist and screenwriter who won the 1975 Booker Prize for Heat and Dust and two Oscars for her Merchant Ivory screenplays.
Saki
Saki, pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), Burma-born British satirical short-story writer of Reginald, The Chronicles of Clovis, and Beasts and Super-Beasts, killed by a sniper in France in 1916.
Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney (born 1991, Castlebar, Ireland) is the Irish novelist of Conversations with Friends, Normal People, Beautiful World Where Are You, and Intermezzo. Known for unmarked dialogue and TV adaptations, and for Faber withdrawing her books from UK sale in 2026 over her Palestine Action support.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie (born 1947, Bombay) is a British Indian American novelist, author of Midnight's Children (1981 Booker Prize, Booker of Bookers) and The Satanic Verses, target of the 1989 Iranian fatwa and a 2022 stabbing at Chautauqua; author of Knife and The Eleventh Hour.
Samuel Butler (novelist)
Samuel Butler (1835–1902), English novelist and satirist, author of Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), New Zealand sheep farmer, critic of Darwin, and posthumous Victorian iconoclast.
Samuel Richardson
Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), English printer and novelist, pioneer of the epistolary novel; wrote Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747–48), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), and rivaled Henry Fielding as a founder of the modern English novel.
Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist, playwright, and poet, born in Dublin in 1955, who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times and twice won the Costa Book of the Year.
Somerville and Ross
Somerville and Ross was the joint pen name of Irish cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, who wrote The Real Charlotte and the Irish R.M. stories.
Stella Gibbons
Stella Gibbons (Stella Dorothea Gibbons, 1902–1989) was a British journalist, poet, and novelist best known for Cold Comfort Farm (1932), her comic parody of rural novels.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978), English novelist, poet, and translator; author of Lolly Willowes, Summer Will Show, and Kingdoms of Elfin; Communist Party member, partner of Valentine Ackland, New Yorker short-story writer.
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), English novelist and poet, author of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Jude the Obscure, set in fictional Wessex; after 1895 he wrote nearly a thousand poems.
Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) was an English novelist, poet, and satirist whose seven satirical novels caricatured Romantic-era figures at dinner tables; his essay The Four Ages of Poetry prompted Shelley's Defence of Poetry.