Curated playlist
English male novelists
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats. He was twelve years old, and his father had just been locked inside the Marshalsea debtors' prison in…
- J. R. R. TolkienOn the evening of his 21st birthday, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien sat down and wrote a letter to a young woman named Edith Mary Bratt. His guardian had forbidden him from even corresponding with her until that day. Tolkien told her he had…
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPercy Bysshe Shelley was drowned in a storm off the Italian coast on the 8th of July 1822, age 29, before most of the world had ever read a word he wrote. His boat, the Don Juan, had been custom-built in Genoa, and his second wife Mary…
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold. He was a journalist who wrote poems that outlived empires, a children's author whom Henry…
- Lewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on the 27th of January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the third oldest of 11 children, and the world would come to know him by a name he invented for himself: Lewis Carroll. That name…
- Thomas HardyThomas Hardy died at Max Gate on the 11th of January 1928, but not before dictating one final poem to his wife from his deathbed. His death certificate listed cardiac syncope as the cause, with old age as a contributing factor. He was 87.…
- Jonathan SwiftJonathan Swift, dying near 78, asked to be buried under the pillar next to the monument of Primate Narcissus Marsh, a man he had openly disdained in life. His own epitaph in St Patrick's Cathedral speaks of fierce indignation that can no…
- William MorrisWilliam Morris arrived in the world on the 24th of March 1834, and by the time he died on the 3rd of October 1896, he had left his mark on textiles, poetry, fantasy fiction, architectural preservation, and revolutionary socialism. Few…
- A. A. MilneA. A. Milne taught himself to read at the age of two. That detail feels right for a man who would spend his life in thrall to words, though the books that made him famous were not the ones he cared most about writing. Alan Alexander Milne…
- Benjamin DisraeliBenjamin Disraeli climbed what he called "the top of the greasy pole" to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, not once but twice, despite arriving at Westminster as an outsider with debts he could not fully settle until 1849, a…
- James Wood (critic)James Douglas Graham Wood was born on the 1st of November 1965 in Durham, England, and by his mid-twenties he had made himself into one of the most argued-about literary critics writing in English. His father, Dennis William Wood, was a…
- Graeme Davis (game designer)Graeme Davis took home three Gold ENNIE Awards in 2023 for Mythic Britain & Ireland, including Product of the Year. By that point, his career had already spanned nearly four decades. Davis was one of the original designers of Warhammer…
- Aldous HuxleyAldous Huxley died at 5:20 pm Pacific Standard Time on the 22nd of November 1963 - and almost nobody noticed. His death was overshadowed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which happened less than seven hours later that same day. The…
- Daniel DefoeDaniel Defoe died on the 24th of April 1731 in Ropemakers Alley, probably hiding from creditors, not far from where he had been born roughly seven decades earlier. He left behind little wealth, a tangle of lawsuits with the royal treasury,…
- Thomas MoreThomas More climbed the scaffold at Tower Hill on the 6th of July 1535 and, finding the structure so rickety it might collapse, told the waiting official: "I pray you, master Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down, let me shift…
- Samuel Butler (novelist)Samuel Butler was born on the 4th of December 1835 at the rectory in Langar, Nottinghamshire. His father Rev Thomas Butler had been a son of Dr Samuel Butler who served as headmaster of Shrewsbury School before becoming Bishop of…
- Cavan ScottCavan Scott was born on the 18th of April 1973, and by any measure his career defies easy categorisation. He has written for Doctor Who and Star Wars. He has penned comics for DC and Marvel. He has helped launch a magazine, appeared on BBC…
- Philip SidneyPhilip Sidney died on the 17th of October 1586, at the age of 31, from a wound to the thigh he had received at the Battle of Zutphen. He left behind an unfinished romance whose third book breaks off in the middle of a sword fight. He left…
- Michael MoorcockMichael Moorcock was born on the 18th of December 1939 in Mitcham, Surrey, and before he ever entered primary school he had already read Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, and Edwin Lester Arnold. He grew up in wartime London,…
- Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin was offered the post of Poet Laureate in 1984, and he turned it down. The death of Sir John Betjeman had opened the role, the highest poetic honour in Britain. Larkin said no, partly because he felt he had long since stopped…
- Kevin Crossley-HollandKevin Crossley-Holland has translated a passage from Beowulf in which Grendel storms out of the mist toward the mead hall: "Then, under night's shroud, Grendel walked down from the moors. He shouldered God's anger. The evil plunderer…
- Richard AldingtonRichard Aldington was born Edward Godfree Aldington in Portsmouth on the 8th of July 1892, into a household where books lined every wall and both parents wrote for publication. His father sold stationery on Portsmouth High Street before…
- Colin WilsonColin Henry Wilson spent a winter sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath in a sleeping bag, working by day at the British Museum's Reading Room on a novel he had been rewriting for years. He was in his early twenties, broke, and so determined…
- Thomas NasheThomas Nashe was baptised in Lowestoft on the 30th of November 1567, the son of a curate who would eventually be awarded the living at the church of All Saints in West Harling. That modest Suffolk beginning gave little sign of what was…