Jocelyn Playfair
Playfair was born in Lucknow in the year that her father, Lieutenant-Colonel Noel Malan, accompanied the Younghusband expedition to Tibet. Both her parents were descended from the highly artistic French Huguenot Malan family. She lived with her husband in India in the early 1930s but returned to Britain after the birth of their two sons. Her first book (a thriller) appeared in 1939 and she wrote three other novels before publishing what is perhaps her best known novel, A House in the Country in 1944. She stopped writing in the 1950s.
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Winifred Peck
Lady Winifred Peck (née Knox), born 1882, was a member of a remarkable family. Her father was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, the fourth Bishop of Manchester, and her siblings were E. V. Knox, editor of Punch magazine, Ronald Knox, theologian and writer, Dilly Knox, cryptographer, Wilfred Lawrence Knox, clergyman, and Ethel Knox. Peck’s niece was the Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote a biography of her father, E. V. Knox, and her uncles, entitled The Knox Brothers.
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She read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her first book was a biography of Louis IX in 1909.
In 1911 she married James Peck, a British civil servant, who was awarded a knighthood in 1938. They had three children.
In 1919 she began her novel-writing care -
Margaret Bonham
Margaret Bonham (1913-91) was born in London and went to Wimbledon High School for Girls. She married disastrously when very young, but re-married in 1940 and lived in Wales with her conscientious objector husband Deryck Bazalgette, who was working on the land. A daughter, Cary, was born in 1942, and a son in 1944. After the war she abandoned her family to marry Charles Kimber, the socialist inheritor of a baronetcy and affluence, with whom she shared a love of rally driving and good living; their home was a large C17th house in Oxfordshire, where two more children were born. Meanwhile she had published short stories in magazines: The Casino (1948) was her own selection; a novel came out in 1951. Her third and final marriage having collapse
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Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).
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Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1853, when Frances was 4 years old, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in New Market, Tennessee. Frances began her writing career there at age 19 to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines. In 1870, her mother died. In Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1873 she married Swan M. Burnett, who became a medical doctor. Their first son Lionel was born a year later. The Bu -
Pat Barker
Pat Barker is an English writer known for her fiction exploring themes of memory, trauma, and survival. She gained prominence with Union Street (1982), a stark portrayal of working-class women's lives, and later achieved critical acclaim with the Regeneration Trilogy (1991–1995), a series blending history and fiction to examine the psychological impact of World War I. The final book, The Ghost Road (1995), won the Booker Prize. In recent years, she has turned to retelling classical myths from a female perspective, beginning with The Silence of the Girls (2018). Barker's work is widely recognized for its direct and unflinching storytelling.
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Philippa Pearce
Philippa Pearce was an acclaimed English author of children’s literature, best remembered for her classic time-slip novel Tom’s Midnight Garden, which won the 1958 Carnegie Medal and remains a staple of British children’s fiction. Raised in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, in the Mill House by the River Cam, Pearce drew lifelong inspiration from her rural upbringing. Educated at the Perse School for Girls and Girton College, Cambridge, she studied English and History before working as a civil servant and later producing schools’ radio programmes for the BBC.
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Her debut, Minnow on the Say (1955), inspired by local landscapes and a childhood canoe trip, was a Carnegie runner-up and later adapted for television. Tom’s Midnight Garden, also rooted -
Iris Murdoch
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
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Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her -
Iain Pears
Iain Pears is an English art historian, novelist and journalist. He was educated at Warwick School, Warwick, Wadham College and Wolfson College, Oxford. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for the BBC, Channel 4 (UK) and ZDF (Germany) and correspondent for Reuters from 1982 to 1990 in Italy, France, UK and US. In 1987 he became a Getty Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Yale University. His well-known novel series features Jonathan Argyll, art historian, though international fame first arrived with his best selling book An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998), which was translated into several languages. Pears currently lives with his wife and children in Oxford.
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Nancy Mitford
Nancy Mitford, styled The Hon. Nancy Mitford before her marriage and The Hon. Mrs Peter Rodd thereafter, was an English novelist and biographer, one of the Bright Young People on the London social scene in the inter-war years. She was born at 1 Graham Street (now Graham Place) in Belgravia, London, the eldest daughter of Lord Redesdale, and was brought up at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire. She was the eldest of the six controversial Mitford sisters.
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She is best remembered for her series of novels about upper-class life in England and France, particularly the four published after 1945; but she also wrote four well-received, well-researched popular biographies (of Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, and Frederick the Great). She was one of -
Jonathan Coe
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Jonathan Coe, born 19 August 1961 in Birmingham, is a British novelist and writer. His work usually has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name, in the light of the 'carve up' of the UK's resources which some felt was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's right wing Conservative governments of the 1980s. Coe studied at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge, before teaching at the University of Warwick w -
J.L. Carr
Carr was born in Thirsk Junction, Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire, into a Wesleyan Methodist family. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master for the North Eastern Railway. Carr was given the same Christian name as his father and the middle name Lloyd, after David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer. He adopted the names Jim and James in adulthood. His brother Raymond, who was also a station master, called him Lloyd.
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Carr's early life was shaped by failure. He attended the village school at Carlton Miniott. He failed the scholarship exam, which denied him a grammar school education, and on finishing his school career he also failed to gain admission to t -
Joseph O'Connor
There is more than one author with this name
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Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin. He is the author of the novels Cowboys and Indians (short-listed for the Whitbread Prize), Desperadoes , The Salesman , Inishowen , Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls , as well as a number of bestselling works of non-fiction.
He was recently voted ‘Irish Writer of the Decade’ by the readers of Hot Press magazine. He broadcasts a popular weekly radio diary on RTE’s Drivetime With Mary Wilson and writes regularly for The Guardian Review and The Sunday Independent. In 2009 he was the Harman Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Baruch College, the City University of New York. -
Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant.
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The first of these, The Man in the Queue (1929) was published under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot , whose name also appears on the title page of another of her 1929 novels, Kif; An Unvarnished History. She also used the Daviot by-line for a biography of the 17th century cavalry leader John Graham, which was entitled Claverhouse (1937).
Mackintosh also wrote plays (both one act and full length), some of which were produced during her lifetime, under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot. The district of Daviot, near h -
L.P. Hartley
Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction reviewer for periodicals including the Spectator and Saturday Review. His first book, Night Fears (1924) was a collection of short stories; but it was not until the publication of Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black prize, that Hartley gained widespread recognition as an author. His other novels include The Go-Between (1953), which was adapted into an internationally-successful film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, and The Hireling (1957), the film version of which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
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Barbara Pym
People know British writer Barbara Pym for her comic novels, such as Excellent Women (1952), of English life.
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After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.
The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. A -
D.E. Stevenson
There is more than one author with this name
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Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a best-selling Scottish author. She published more than 40 romantic novels over a period of more than 40 years. Her father was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson.
D.E. Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States. Like E.F. Benson, Ann Bridge, O. Douglas or Dorothy L. Sayers (to name but a few) her books are funny, intensely readable, engaging and dependable. -
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Also wrote under the name Dorothy Canfield.
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Dorothy Canfield Fisher (February 17, 1879 – November 9, 1958) was an educational reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author in the early decades of the twentieth century. She strongly supported women's rights, racial equality, and lifelong education. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in the United States. In addition to bringing the Montessori method of child-rearing to the U.S., she presided over the country's first adult education program and shaped literary tastes by serving as a member of the Book of the Month Club selection committee from 1925 to 1951.
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Dorothy Whipple
Born in 1893, DOROTHY WHIPPLE (nee Stirrup) had an intensely happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, for three years she worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham; here she wrote Young Anne (1927), the first of nine extremely successful novels which included Greenbanks (1932) and The Priory (1939). Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight (1934) and They were Sisters (1943), were made into films. She also wrote short storie
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Siân James
Siân James was a Welsh novelist who wrote in English.
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James attended the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She was a Fellow of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Glamorgan. She was a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. She twice won the Yorkshire Post Prize, and her third novel, A Small Country, has come to be regarded as a classic of Anglo-Welsh literature. In 2006, A Small Country was made into a Welsh-language TV series (Calon Gaeth), which won the 2007 Bafta Cymru award for Best Drama/Drama Serial for Television.
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Winifred Watson
Winifred Eileen Watson (20 October 1906 - 5 August 2002) was an English writer. She is best known for her novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which was adapted into a major motion picture of the same name (released in 2008).
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Bibliography:
Fell Top (1935)
Odd Shoes (1936)
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938)
Upyonder (1938)
Hop, Step, Jump (1939)
Leave and Bequeath (1943) -
Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979, and was raised as a Strict Baptist. Having studied English at Anglia Ruskin University she worked as a civil servant before studying for an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative Writing and the Gothic at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2004 she won the Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Award for travel writing.
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In January 2013 she was Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone's Library. Here she completed the final draft of her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood , which was published by Serpent's Tail in June 2014 to international critical acclaim. It won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award 2014, and was longlisted for the 2014 Guardian First Book Award and nominated for the 2014 Folio Prize. -
Winifred Peck
Lady Winifred Peck (née Knox), born 1882, was a member of a remarkable family. Her father was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, the fourth Bishop of Manchester, and her siblings were E. V. Knox, editor of Punch magazine, Ronald Knox, theologian and writer, Dilly Knox, cryptographer, Wilfred Lawrence Knox, clergyman, and Ethel Knox. Peck’s niece was the Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote a biography of her father, E. V. Knox, and her uncles, entitled The Knox Brothers.
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She read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her first book was a biography of Louis IX in 1909.
In 1911 she married James Peck, a British civil servant, who was awarded a knighthood in 1938. They had three children.
In 1919 she began her novel-writing care -
Margaret Bonham
Margaret Bonham (1913-91) was born in London and went to Wimbledon High School for Girls. She married disastrously when very young, but re-married in 1940 and lived in Wales with her conscientious objector husband Deryck Bazalgette, who was working on the land. A daughter, Cary, was born in 1942, and a son in 1944. After the war she abandoned her family to marry Charles Kimber, the socialist inheritor of a baronetcy and affluence, with whom she shared a love of rally driving and good living; their home was a large C17th house in Oxfordshire, where two more children were born. Meanwhile she had published short stories in magazines: The Casino (1948) was her own selection; a novel came out in 1951. Her third and final marriage having collapse
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Lissa Evans
After a brief career in medicine, and an even briefer one in stand-up, Lissa Evans became a comedy producer, first in radio and then in television. Her first novel, Spencer's List, was published in 2002, and since then she has written three more books for adults (two of them longlisted for the Orange/Baileys Prize) and two for children (the first of them shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal). Her two most recent books for adults were set in London during the Second World War; one of them, 'Their Finest Hour and a Half' has now been made into a film entitled 'Their Finest', starring Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin and Bill Nighy
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John Le Carré
John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England), was an English author of espionage novels. Le Carré had resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, Great Britain, for more than 40 years, where he owned a mile of cliff close to Land's End.
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A.J. Pearce
AJ Pearce grew up in Hampshire in the south of England. She studied at the University of Sussex and Northwestern University. A chance discovery of a 1939 women's magazine became the inspiration for her historical series set in WW2, The Chronicles of Emmy Lake.
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Funny, heartbreaking and always feel-good, if you're looking for uplifting novels about friendship and community, you've come to the right place.
You can find AJ on Instagram, FB and Threads @ajpearcewrites.
She also has a monthly newsletter. Please subscribe at https://ajpearce.com/ -
Mishal Husain
Mishal Husain is one of the presenters of BBC Radio 4’s influential Today programme and the television news on BBC One. Her work has taken her from Davos to Rohingya refugee camps and from interviewing Prime Ministers to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Mishal has been named by the Sunday Times as one of the 500 most influential people in Britain. Born in the UK in 1973, she grew up in the Middle East and was later educated at Cambridge University, where she read law.
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Emma Smith
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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EMMA SMITH was born in Cornwall in 1923 and was privately educated. In 1939 she took her first job in the Records Department of the War Office before volunteering for work on the canals; this gave her the material for Maidens' Trip (1948), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. She spent the winter of 1946-7 with a documentary film unit in India and then lived in Paris and wrote The Far Cry (1949), awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best novel of the year in English. In 1951 Emma Smith married and had two children. After her husband's death in 1957 she went to live in rural Wales; she then -
Ruth Adam
Ruth Augusta King was the daughter of a vicar in a Nottinghamshire mining village. After school in Yorkshire, she taught for five years, before marrying the journalist Kenneth Adam and moving with him first to Manchester and then to London. She travelled a great deal, pursuing her wide-ranging interests in education and social policy. Four children were born between 1937 and 1947, by which time the Adams had moved to a large house outside London to live communally with other families. During the war Ruth Adam worked, like many other writers of her generation, in the Ministry of Information; meanwhile her husband joined the BBC, where he later became Director of Television. Ruth Adam wrote twelve novels between 1937 and 1961, all of them con
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