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Susannah Clapp was a founding editor, with Karl Miller, of the London Review of Books and, since 1997, has been the theatre critic of the Observer, a job in which she thought she’d last ‘a year’.

Arthur Walton Litz, Jnr was a literary critic and for some 40 years a Princeton professor of English who once wrote a study of William Faulkner entitled Yoknapatawpha.

Kate Saunders was a journalist, novelist, children’s writer and actress who was also a guest on the first ever episode of the BBC’s news quiz programme Have I Got News for You, in 1990.

Jeremy Treglown is an academic, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a literary biographer. The latter is a form, he says ‘whose subjectivity can in the end only be overcome by dialogue’.

Jonathan Keates is a polyglot biographer, novelist, former schoolteacher and - as a confirmed Venetophile, the city is the subject of his 1994 history - chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund.

Victoria Glendinning is a novelist and biographer - and the only writer to have won the Whitbread Prize for biography twice, in 1983 for her studies of Vita Sackville-West and subsequently in 1992 for her biography of Anthony Trollope.

John Coldstream is a former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and the biographer of Dirk Bogarde. His friendship with Bogarde was formed when the actor was a reviewer for the paper.

One of Canada's most celebrated writers, Alice Munro, was the winner of the third Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

Dr Harriet Harvey Wood OBE is a writer, editor and former head of literature at the British Council.

Mark Lawson is a critic, author and broadcaster whose rightful place as ruler of Britain’s late-night cultural TV shows was acknowledged when he was spoofed by Viz magazine.