Curated category
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
- Frederick S. BoasFrederick Samuel Boas lived for ninety-five years, long enough to see the study of early modern drama transform from a gentleman's hobby into a rigorous…
- Jack ScarisbrickJack Scarisbrick spent nearly a century thinking about how history gets told, and who gets to tell it. Born John Joseph Scarisbrick on the 6th of October…
- 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.
- Agatha ChristieAgatha Christie holds a record no living novelist can claim: more than two billion copies of her books sold, making her the best-selling fiction writer of…
- 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.
- 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.
- George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw refused his own first name. He insisted on being called Bernard Shaw, dropping the George after 1876.
- Emma ThompsonEmma Thompson holds a distinction that no one else in Hollywood history has matched: she has won Academy Awards for both acting and writing.
- Salman RushdieSalman Rushdie was born on the 19th of June 1947 in Bombay, in British India, into a world on the verge of shattering and remaking itself.
- Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief" - and for much of his life, he seemed to be asking the world to practice it on his behalf.
- 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…
- Antony BeevorAntony Beevor was born in Kensington, London, on the 14th of December 1946, into a family with writing in its blood going back generations.
- William DalrympleWilliam Dalrymple first arrived in Delhi on the 26th of January 1984, a teenager who had grown up on the shores of the Firth of Forth in North Berwick…
- Tom StoppardTom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, on the 3rd of July 1937, and he died on the 29th of November 2025, at his home in Dorset…
- Hilary MantelHilary Mantel stood at the podium at the Guildhall in London in 2009 and told the audience she was "happily flying through the air." She had just won the…
- H. F. M. PrescottH. F. M. Prescott lived quietly in the small Oxfordshire town of Charlbury for many years, with her dogs for company, in a house that gave no hint of the…
- Eric HobsbawmEric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born on the 9th of June 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, and he died on the 1st of October 2012 in London, just shy of his 96th…
- 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…
- 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…
- John KeeganJohn Keegan spent 26 years teaching war to men who would fight it, yet he himself never fired a shot in anger. Born in Clapham, London, on the 15th of May…
- Correlli BarnettCorrelli Barnett was born on the 28th of June 1927 in Norbury, in the County Borough of Croydon, into a Britain that still considered itself a great power.
- Vincent CroninVincent Cronin's full name at birth was Vincent Archibald Patrick Cronin, sometimes recorded as Cronogue. He was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, on the 24th…
- A. L. RowseA. L. Rowse was born on the 4th of December 1903 in Tregonissey, a village near St Austell in Cornwall, the son of a china clay worker.
- Frank KermodeFrank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man, the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, in a family he later…
- George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use…
- Martin GilbertMartin Gilbert was born on the 25th of October 1936, the son of a north London jeweller whose family name had once been Goldberg.