Maggie Gee is the author of seventeen books, including a collection of short fiction, The Blue, and a writer’s memoir, MyAnimal Life. Her most recent novel was The Red Children (2022), a fairy tale about migration inspired by the new understandingof Neanderthals as our ancestors. Other books include some very early novels about climate change….
Nicola Beauman is the author of a book about inter-war women writers A Very Great Profession and of three literarybiographies of Lady Cynthia Asquith, EM Forster and the novelist Elizabeth Taylor. She founded Persephone Books in 1999 in order to reprint (mostly) women writers. Many of the one hundred or so authors reprinted by Persephone…
Vineet Lal is a literary translator and equalities campaigner based in Edinburgh. He has degrees in French from theUniversity of Edinburgh and Princeton University, and studied translation and conference interpreting at Heriot-Watt University.After a long career in tourism and destination marketing, he turned to literary translation, and he was one of the first recipients of…
Kit de Waal is a bestselling novelist born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was aninternational bestseller and adapted for television by the BBC. It is on the GCSE curriculum for schools. Kit founded the Big BookWeekend, a free digital literary festival in 2020 and has written…
Philip Womack is the author of several critically acclaimed books for young people, including Wildlord and Ghostlord, which was Sunday Times Children’s Book of the Week. He has worked with the Royal Literary Fund for many years, promoting writing in a variety of settings. He also contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines, including…
Posy Simmonds is an author, illustrator and newspaper cartoonist, who has drawn mainly for The Guardian. Two graphic novels, Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe, were originally serialised in the paper and later, both were made into feature films. A third novel, Cassandra Darke, was published in 2018. Exhibitions of her work include retrospectives at The…
Vaseem Khan is the author of two award-winning crime series set in India and the upcoming Quantum of Menace, the first in a series featuring Q from the James Bond franchise. His debut, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 40 best crime novels published 2015-2020….
Cambridge Classics Professor Emerita and Fellow of Newnham College, Mary Beard, is known across the world. She has written numerous books including the prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, best-selling SPQR – A History of Ancient Rome and the highly-acclaimed Women & Power and Twelve Caesars – Images of Power from the Ancient…
Stephen Fry is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director and all-round national treasure. Fry has written and presented several documentary series, contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines, appears frequently on radio, reads for voice-overs and has written four novels and three volumes of autobiography, Moab Is…
Kate Mosse is an internationally best-selling novelist, short story writer, playwright, non-fiction author and interviewer. Her ten novels include the multi-million selling The Languedoc Trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre, Citadel), The Joubert Family Chronicles (The Burning Chambers, The City of Tears, The Ghost Ship) and Gothic fiction including The Taxidermist’s Daughter, which she has adapted for the…
Mary Hoffman writes mostly for children and teenagers, though she has published some adult fiction. During her time in the SoA she has been Chair of the Children’s Writers and Illustrators Group and she organised a weekend conference for them, she has served on the Management Committee for three years, some of it during the…
Judy Garton-Sprenger is an award-winning ELT author of numerous adult, secondary and primary course books. She has also written radio series for the BBC World Service, and toured the world with the English Teaching Theatre. She has served as Chair of the SoA Educational Writers Group Committee, is a member of the PD James Memorial…
