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Denis Forman was the television executive responsible for bringing the 1977 Booker Prize winner Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet to the small screen as The Jewel in the Crown.

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.