Sylvia Townsend Warner [1893-1978] is best known today as a groundbreaking feminist and lesbian writer who championed the cause of the outsider in novels such as Lolly Willowes. However, this is only one aspect of a writer whose literary career…

Fay Zwicky was born in Melbourne in 1933. Her father was a doctor, her mother a musician. From early in life she trained as a pianist, performing with her violinist and cellist sisters while still at school. She began publishing…

John Dryden was one of the dominant literary figures of the English Restoration period. He began his prolific and versatile writing career in the Puritan era before Charles II became king, and wrote verses on the death of Oliver Cromwell….

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, born at Hillbrow in Johannesburg, is an award-winning South African writer and performance artist. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, although…

Phillis Wheatley was the first US slave to publish a book of poems. Born in Africa in about 1753 and shipped as an 8 year old child to the Boston Slave Market, she was purchased by John Wheatley to be…

Felix Dennis (1947 – 2014) was the colourful publishing entrepreneur whose company, Dennis Publishing, owns many successful titles including flagship publication The Week. A regular fixture in the Sunday Times rich list Dennis travelled a long way since the poverty…

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was born in St, Louis, Missouri. She grew up in her maternal grandfather’s house, where her mother acted as a housekeeper. Moore’s father, an inventor, was committed to an asylum. On his death, Moore moved with her…

Samuel Menashe (1925 – 2011) enlisted in 1943, and was sent to the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, then to England (Cheshire) for further training. His division fought in France, Belgium (The Battle of the Bulge) and Germany. In…

Mimi Khalvati (b. 1944, Tehran) spent much of her childhood at boarding school on the Isle of Wight, only returning to Iran at seventeen. She has been resident in the UK since the age of twenty-five, where she has published…

David Morley is an ecologist, poet, editor and teacher. Emerging with Releasing Stone (Arc, 1989), he has since published five collections with Carcanet, the most recent, The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems (2015), won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award; his previous collection, The…

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) as a poet and critic came to define the modernist movement and still dominates the literary landscape of the last century. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri to a prominent local family. He attended Harvard…

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was a larger-than-life character who is now best known for his Cautionary Verses but who also wrote fiction, essays, history, biography and huge numbers of letters. He was born in a village just outside Paris on the…

Lewis Carroll was the literary pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in 1832, the third in a family of eleven children; he had seven younger sisters. In childhood, he produced magazines for his sisters which display his love of parody,…

Cecil Day-Lewis (who wrote as C. Day Lewis) was born in Ireland in 1904, the son of a Church of Ireland minister. The family moved to England in 1905 and his mother died three years later, when Cecil was four…