Dannie Abse

Dannie Abse was a Welsh poet, author, doctor and playwright. His career as a poet spanned the years 1948-2014 and earned him much acclaim. Abse drew on his identity as a Welshman, his career as a doctor, as well as his Jewish heritage, to inform his wr …

Diana Athill

Peter Barnes

Peter Barnes was an Olivier Award-winning playwright and screenwriter. Barnes achieved critical acclaim and box-office success with his baroque comedy, The Ruling Class, in 1968. He later adapted his play into a 1972 film which garnered Peter O’Toole a …

Sybille Bedford

Sybille Bedford was a sternly disciplined novelist and travel writer. Many of her works are partly autobiographical. A Legacy, Bedford’s second book and first novel, was published in 1956 and was described by Francis King as ‘one of the great books of …

Anne Olivier Bell

Lord Blake

Robert Norman William Blake was a Conservative historian. He is best known for his 1966 biography of Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, and for The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill, which grew out of his 1968 Ford lectures. He was cr …

Sir Christopher Bland

Victor Bonham-Carter

Victor Bonham-Carter was a zealous champion of authors and the countryside and enjoyed a varied career as an author, farmer and publisher. Bonham-Carter wrote a number of books about rural matters, including The English Village (1952). In the field of …

Ciaran Carson

Charles Causley

Charles Causley was a Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer. His work is noted for its simplicity and directness and for its associations with folklore, especially when linked to his native Cornwall. In 1958, Causley was made a Fellow of the Royal Soci …

Hugh Cecil

William Cooper

William Cooper (Harry Summerfield Hoff), was a novelist who depicted the mysteriousness of ordinary people through a naturalistic eye. He was the author of Scenes from a Provincial Life, (1950) hailed by writers including Kingsley Amis, Braine and Anth …

Michael Donaghy

Michael Donaghy was a New York poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985. He published his first full collection, Shibboleth, in 1988 which won the National Poetry Competition. Errata followed in 1993, and Conjure in 2000. Recognition came in th …

Helen Dunmore

I was delighted to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, because it’s an honour given by writers to writers. We may be solitary creatures in our work but we need to band together too. I like the idea of fellowship very much. The photograp …

D.J. Enright

Dennis Joseph ‘D.J.’ Enright was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic. He spent the best part of twenty five years lecturing abroad in Japan, Thailand and Singapore to name but a few of the Far East countries he explored. By 1974 he was direct …

Sir Richard Faber

Sir Richard Faber wrote well-crafted books of 19th-century English history, and a biography of the courtier Sir William Temple. He ended his diplomatic career as Ambassador to Algeria. Faber was appointed CMG in 1977, and was a Fellow of the Royal Soci …

Moris Farhi

Musa Moris Farhi was a novelist and poet. He was Vice-President of International PEN from 2001 to his death in 2019.

Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein was a poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator.

Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher was a British poet and jazz pianist. Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry.

Christopher Fry

Christopher Fry was an English poet and playwright. He is best known for his verse dramas, notably The Lady’s Not for Burning. He was, with T.S. Eliot, the leading figure in the revival of poetic drama that took place in Britain in the late 1940s.

Magdalen Goffin

Magdalen Goffin has written biographies of her grandmother, Maria Pasqua, and her father, E. I. Watkin, and edited the diaries of another ancestor Absalom Watkin. She also wrote numerous articles and reviews for the New York Review of Books (1966–69).

Giles Gordon

Giles Gordon was a Scottish literary agent and writer, based for most of his career in London. Among the writers he represented at the literary agent Sheil Land Associates were Peter Ackroyd, Penelope Mortimer, Vikram Seth, Sue Townsend and Fay Weldon. …

Grey Gowrie (The Earl of Gowrie)

James Harding

James Harding was an expert on French music and a lover of bizarre facts. He shared his interest in French musical and theatrical culture through the 20 or so books he wrote, their subjects ranging from Saint-Saëns, Rossini and Gounod through French op …

Barbara Hardy

Barbara Hardy, FRSL, FBA was a British literary scholar, author, and poet. As an academic, she specialised in the literature of the 19th Century. From 1965 to 1970, she was Professor of English at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Then, fro …

Sir Ronald Harwood

Alethea Hayter

Alethea Hayter wrote books of immaculate scholarship and intense readability. For a quarter of a century, she was also an excellent cultural ambassador with the British Council. Her first book, on the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, appeared in 1 …

John Heath-Stubbs

John Heath-Stubbs OBE was an English poet and translator, known for his verse influenced by classical myths, and the long Arthurian poem, Artorius.  He was a representative figure of British poetry in the early 1950s, editing the poetry anthology Image …

Drue Heinz

Drue Heinz (born Doreen Mary English) was an American patron of the literary arts, actress, philanthropist and socialite. She was the publisher of the literary magazine The Paris Review (1993 to 2007), co-founded Ecco Press, founded literary retreats a …

Ursula Holden

Ursula Holden was novelist and short story writer. Born in Dorset, she lived in Egypt, Dublin and London throughout her life. Heralded by the Times as ‘one of the most seriously radiant new English writers,’ her Tin Toys trilogy was re-released in 2013 …

Hugh Honour

Samuel Hynes

P.D. James (Baroness James of Holland Park OBE JP)

Phyllis Dorothy James, born August 3 1920, was one of England’s most prolific and accomplished crime writers. Her first novel, published in 1962, was called Cover Her Face and featured the poet and detective Adam Dalgleish, who was to become her best k …

Clive James

Roy Jenkins (The Rt Hon Lord Jenkins of Hillhead)

Roy Jenkins was heavily involved in politics throughout his life, overseeing the reform of laws concerning capital and corporal punishment, homosexuality, divorce, abortion and race relations during his time in parliament. He is, to date, the first and …

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala CBE

Ruth Prawer was born in Cologne to a Polish father and German mother. The family relocated to Britain in 1939.  She married Cyrus Jhabvala in 1951 and they moved to Delhi, after 1975 splitting their time between India and New York. Although perhaps bes …

Jenny Joseph

Jenny Joseph’s best known poem, ‘Warning’, was written in 1961, first published in The Listener that year, and later included in her 1974 collection Rose In the Afternoon. ‘Warning’ was identified as the UK’s ‘most popular post-war poem’ in a 1996 poll …

H.R.F. Keating

H.R.F Keating Henry Reymond Fitzwalter ‘Harry’ Keating was an English crime fiction writer most notable for his series of novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID. He also wrote many non-Ghote crime stories, several general novels — including …

Linda Kelly

Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr was an advertising copywriter before becoming a full-time writer in 1989. He wrote over 30 books, and is known for the Bernie Gunther series of historical thrillers set in Germany and elsewhere during the 1930s, the Second World War and the …

Oliver Knox

Oliver Knox began his career as a copy-writer and was, in part, responsible for making the post-war advertising industry attractive to some of the country’s best and brightest graduates. When Knox retired from advertising he wrote four novels and trave …

Brendan Lehane

Laurence Lerner

Laurence Lerner, often called Larry, was a South African-born British literary critic and poet and novelist. Also a lecturer, he taught in many universities around the world.

Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy FRSL was an author best known for the novels Small Island and The Long Song. She was born in London to Jamaican parents, and her work explores topics related to British Jamaicans and how they negotiate racial, cultural and national identiti …

Jeremy Lewis

Elizabeth Longford (Elizabeth, Countess of Longford)

Elizabeth, Countess of Longford, was a British historian. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was on the board of trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Her biographies include those of 19th century luminaries such as …

Fiona MacCarthy

Fiona MacCarthy was a design historian, biographer and cultural critic.

Brenda Maddox

Douglas Matthews

Ved Mehta

Jan Morris

Nicholas Mosley (Lord Ravensdale)

V.S. Naipaul (Sir Vidia Naipaul)

Eric Newby

Eric Newby was a prolific writer of travel books, totaling twenty five. The most famous of these was A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Love and War in the Appenines detailed his ordeal as an escaped Prisoner of War, sheltered by a Slovenian woman call …

Norman Nicholson

Norman Nicholson was a poet and dramatist. He is particularly admired for his poetry and topographical writing and is now recognised as a writer who dealt with important environmental and ecological themes.

Leslie Norris

Leslie Norris was a prize-winning Welsh poet and short story writer writer. Until 1974 he earned his living as a college lecturer, teacher and headmaster. From 1974 he combined full-time writing with residencies at academic institutions in Britain and …

John Julius Norwich (Viscount Norwich)

John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO, was an English popular historian and travel writer.

George Painter

George Painter, known as George D. Painter, was an English author most famous as a biographer of Marcel Proust. His two-volume biography of Proust was published in 1959 and 1965. According to Miron Grindea, this was, ‘rightly greeted as one of the grea …

Phillipa Pearce

Author of Tom’s Midnight Garden, Ann Philippa Pearce was a beloved writer of children’s fiction. She was also an editor, nurturing the careers of many other writers. Writing a great many children’s books following a career in the BBC writing scripts fo …

Piers Plowright

John Press

John Press was not only a great poet but an advocate for the arts, campaigning tirelessly for the creation of a Department of Literature within the British Council to celebrate the long history of British proficiency in writing. He was also an editor f …

Isabel Quigly

Alan Raitt

Alan Raitt was one of the most distinguished post-war British scholars of 19th-century French literature, particularly noted for his work on Flaubert and on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. A Special Lecturer in French Literature at Oxford University from 1976 …

Jasper Ridley

Jasper Godwin Ridley (25 May 1920 – 1 July 2004) was a British writer, known for historical biographies. He received the 1970 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography Lord Palmerston. Born in West Hoathly, Sussex, he was educated at Magdalen C …

Norman Sherry

Clive Sinclair

He is remembered as an award-winning novelist and short story writer.

Dame Muriel Spark

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was an award-winning Scottish novelist. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945”, at No. 8.

Giles St Aubyn LVO

Giles St Aubyn was born in 1925, and was educated at Wellington College and Trinity College, Oxford. He was for a short time in the Navy during the Second World War. He subsequently taught at Eton, becoming head of the History Department in 1961. His b …

William St Clair

Anthony Thwaite

A.T. Tolley

Professor Arnold Trevor Tolley was born in Birmingham and educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Queen’s College Oxford. He taught at a number of universities including as professor of Comparative Literature at Carleton University in Canada ( …

William Trevor

Val Warner

Sir Arnold Wesker

Sir Arnold Wesker was the author of 50 plays, four volumes of short stories, two volumes of essays, a book on journalism, a children’s book, extensive journalism, poetry, and other assorted writings. His plays have been translated into up to 20 differe …

Lewis Wolpert

Charles Wood

Charles Wood was a playwright and scriptwriter for radio, television, and film. He lived in England. His work has been staged at the National Theatre, the Royal Court and in the theatres of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Wood served in the 17th/21st La …

Robert Woof CBE

Dr Robert Samuel Woof (20 April 1931 – 7 November 2005) was an English scholar, most famous for having been the first Director of the Wordsworth Trust and Museums Director of the Wordsworth Museum at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Lake District, Cumbria. Do …

Francis Wyndham

Francis Wyndham was an author, literary editor and journalist. He became an editor at Queen magazine and in 1964 moved to The Sunday Times, where he stayed until 1980. He became Jean Rhys’ literary executor after her death in 1979.