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Ox-Tales
Ox-Tales refers to four anthologies of short stories written by 38 of the UK's best-known authors. All donated their stories to Oxfam. The books and stories are loosely based on the four elements: Earth, Fire, Air and Water. The Ox-Tales books were published in partnership with Green ProfileGreen Profile to raise revenue for projects tackling around the world. Oxfam receives a percentage of the cover price of each book sold (£3.50 per book if bought directly from an Oxfam shop or Oxfam's website and 50p if the books are purchased through other retailers). Themes The them ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michel Faber
Michel Faber (born 13 April 1960) is a Dutch-born writer of English-language fiction, including his 2002 novel ''The Crimson Petal and the White''. His latest book is a novel for young adults, '' D: A Tale of Two Worlds'', published in 2020. His next book, ''Listen'', a non-fiction work about music, is due in 2023. Life Faber was born in The Hague, Netherlands. He and his parents emigrated to Australia in 1967. He attended primary and secondary school in the Melbourne suburbs of Boronia and Bayswater, then attended the University of Melbourne, studying Dutch, Philosophy, Rhetoric, English Language (a course involving translation and criticism of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts) and English Literature. He graduated in 1980. He worked as a cleaner and at various other casual jobs, before training as a nurse at Marrickville and Western Suburbs hospitals in Sydney. He nursed until the mid-1990s. In 1993 he, his second wife and family emigrated to Scotland. Faber's second wife Ev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian Rankin
Sir Ian James Rankin (born 28 April 1960) is a Scottish crime writer, best known for his Inspector Rebus novels. Early life Rankin was born in Cardenden, Fife. His father, James, owned a grocery shop, and his mother, Isobel, worked in a school canteen. He was educated at Beath High School, Cowdenbeath. His parents were horrified when he then chose to study literature at university, as they had expected him to study for a trade. Encouraged by his English teacher, he persisted and graduated in 1982 from the University of Edinburgh, where he also worked on a doctorate on Muriel Spark but did not complete it. He has taught at the university and retains an involvement with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lived in Tottenham, London, for four years and then rural France for six while he developed his career as a novelist. Before becoming a full-time novelist, he worked as a grape picker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher, hi-fi journalist, college secretary and punk music ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diran Adebayo
Oludiran "Diran" Adebayo FRSL (born 30 August 1968) is a British novelist, cultural critic and academic, best known for his tales of London and the lives of African diasporans. His work has been characterised by its interest in multiple cultural identities, subcultures, and its distinctive, "musical" use of language. His fans include the writer Zadie Smith, who has praised him for his "humanness", arguing that he is one of a few English writers who "trade in both knowledge and feeling". In 2002 ''The Times Literary Supplement'' named him as one of the Best Young British Novelists. Education and career Born Oludiran Adebayo in London in 1968, to Nigerian parents, Adebayo won a Major Scholarship when he was 12 to Malvern College, where he boarded as an adolescent, and is an Oxford University Law graduate. Among his friends at Wadham College, Oxford, were the writers Monica Ali and Hari Kunzru, while the Afro-Futurist critic and theorist Kodwo Eshun, whom Adebayo cites in his Ackn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Esther Freud
Esther Freud (born 2 May 1963) is a British novelist. Early life and training Born in London, Freud is the daughter of Bernardine Coverley and painter Lucian Freud. She is also a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and niece of Clement Freud. She travelled extensively with her mother as a child, returning to London at 16 to train as an actress at The Drama Centre. Career She has worked in television and theatre as both actress and writer. Her first credited television appearance was as a terrified diner in ''The Bill'' in 1984, running frantically out of a Chinese restaurant after it had received a bomb scare. A year later she appeared as an alien in the ''Doctor Who'' serial '' Attack of the Cybermen''. Her novels include the semi-autobiographical ''Hideous Kinky'', which was adapted into a film starring Kate Winslet. She is also the author of ''The Wild'', ''Gaglow'', and ''The Sea House''. She also wrote the foreword for '' The Summer Book'' by Tove Jansson. Freud was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hari Kunzru
Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru (born 1969) is a British novelist and journalist. He is the author of the novels '' The Impressionist'', '' Transmission'', ''My Revolutions'', ''Gods Without Men'', ''White Tears''David Robinson"Interview: Hari Kunzru, author" scotsman.com, 29 July 2011 and ''Red Pill''. His work has been translated into twenty languages. Personal life Kunzru was born in London to an Indian Kashmiri Pandit father and a British mother. He grew up in Essex and educated at Bancroft's School. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from University of Warwick. In his teens, Kunzru decided that he did not believe in formal religion or God, and is "opposed to how religion is used to police people." Kunzru is married to novelist Katie Kitamura, and the couple have two children. Kunzru is fascinated by UFOs and as a youngster often imagined a close-encounter type experience with them. Career From 1995 to 1997 he worked on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DBC Pierre
Peter Warren Finlay (born in 1961), also known as DBC Pierre, is an Australian author who wrote the novel ''Vernon God Little''. Pierre was born in South Australia, and largely raised in Mexico. He has resided in the Republic of Ireland and now, according to an August 2020 interview in ''The Guardian'', lives in Cambridgeshire.. Pierre was awarded the 2003 Man Booker Prize for ''Vernon God Little'', his first novel, becoming the third Australian-born author to be so honoured. Upon winning the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 he became the first writer to receive a Man Booker and a Whitbread for the same book. The book also won the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Prize for comic literature at the Hay Festival in 2003, and earned the author a James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. Early life Born in Old Reynella, South Australia, where his father was lecturing in genetics at the University of Adelaide, Pierre had, by the age ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helen Simpson (author)
Helen Simpson (born 1957) is an English novelist and short story writer. Early life and education She was born in Bristol, in the West of England, and grew up first in Wealdstone then in a suburb of Croydon where she went to a girls' school. Her mother was a primary-school teacher and her father was a naval architect who later taught. The first from her family to go to university, she read English at Oxford University where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce. Career She worked at ''Vogue'' for five years before her success in writing short stories meant she could afford to leave and concentrate full-time on her writing. Her first collection, ''Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories'', 1990, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was followed by a second collection, ''Dear George'', in 1995. ''Hey Yeah Right Get A Life'', 2000, a series of interlinked stories, won the Hawthornden Prize, and was renamed ''Getting a Life'' for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexander McCall Smith
Alexander "Sandy" McCall Smith, CBE, FRSE (born 24 August 1948), is a British writer. He was raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and formerly Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. He became an expert on medical law and bioethics and served on related British and international committees. He has since become known as a fiction writer, with sales in English exceeding 40 million by 2010 and translations into 46 languages. He is known as the creator of ''The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency'' series. The "McCall" derives from his great-great-grandmother Bethea McCall, who married James Smith at Glencairn, Dumfries-shire, in 1833. Early life Alexander McCall Smith was born in 1948 in Bulawayo in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), to British parents. He was the only son, having three elder sisters. His father worked as a public prosecutor in Bulawayo. McCall Smith's paternal grandfather was the medical doctor and New Zealand communit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicholas Shakespeare
Nicholas William Richmond Shakespeare FRSL (born 3 March 1957) is a British novelist and biographer, described by the ''Wall Street Journal'' as "one of the best English novelists of our time". Biography Born in Worcester, England to diplomat John William Richmond Shakespeare and his wife Lalage Ann, daughter of the travel writer and journalist S. P. B. Mais, Shakespeare grew up in the Far East and in South America, including Brazil, where his father worked at the British Embassy between 1966 and 1969. John Shakespeare was later chargé d'affaires at Buenos Aires, before serving as Ambassador to Peru from 1983 to 1987, and Ambassador to Morocco from 1987 to 1990. Nicholas was educated at the Dragon School preparatory school in Oxford, then at Winchester College and at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He worked as a journalist for BBC television and then on ''The Times'' as assistant arts and literary editor. From 1988 to 1991, he was literary editor of ''The Daily Telegraph'' and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zoë Heller
Zoë Kate Hinde Heller (born 7 July 1965) is an English journalist and novelist long resident in New York City. She has published three novels, ''Everything You Know'' (1999), ''Notes on a Scandal'' (2003), and ''The Believers'' (2008). ''Notes on a Scandal'' was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a feature film in 2006. Biography Early life Heller was born in St Pancras, north London, as the youngest of four children of Caroline (née Carter) and Lukas Heller, a successful screenwriter; her parents separated when she was five. Her father was a German Jewish immigrant and her mother was English and a Quaker. Her paternal grandfather was the political philosopher Hermann Heller. Her brother is screenwriter Bruno Heller. Her sister, Lucy Heller, is Chief Executive of education charity Ark and previously Managing Director of Times Supplements Ltd, the former educational publishing wing of News UK. She attended Haverstock School in north London where she was a c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marina Lewycka
Marina Lewycka ( ; born 12 October 1946) is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin. Early life Lewycka was born in a refugee camp in Kiel after World War II. Her family subsequently moved to England; she now lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. She attended Gainsborough High School for Girls in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, then Witney Grammar School in Witney, Oxfordshire. She graduated from Keele University in 1968 with a BA in English and Philosophy, and from the University of York with a BPhil in English Literature in 1969. She began, but did not complete, a PhD at King's College London. Career She was a lecturer in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University until her retirement in March 2012. Works Lewycka's debut novel ''A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian'' won the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing at the Hay literary festival, the 2005/6 Waverton Good Read Award, and the 2005 Saga Award for Wit; it was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louise Welsh
Louise Welsh (born 1 February 1965 in London) is an English-born author of short stories and psychological thrillers, resident in Glasgow, Scotland. She has also written three plays, an opera, edited volumes of prose and poetry, and contributed to journals and anthologies. In 2004, she received the Corine Literature Prize. Education Welsh studied history at Glasgow University and after graduating established and worked at a second-hand bookshop for several years before publishing her first novel. Career Welsh's debut novel ''The Cutting Room'' (2002) was nominated for several literary awards including the 2003 Orange Prize for Fiction. It won the Crime Writers' Association Creasey Dagger for the best first crime novel. Welsh's second major work, the novella '' Tamburlaine Must Die'' (2004), fictionally recounts the last few days in the life of 16th-century English dramatist and poet Christopher Marlowe, author of '' Tamburlaine the Great''. Her third novel, ''The Bullet Trick'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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