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Use our search to browse hundreds of features and pages from the Booker Library of authors, books, judges, prize years and translators. You can narrow down your search using quotation marks to find an exact match.

Displaying 1781 - 1790 of 3137

Hilary Spurling
Hilary Spurling is a biographer who works according to the mantra that: ‘Anyone attempting a portrait should above all approach the subject without preconceptions’.
Michael Ratcliffe’s first forays into the world of work were as a supply teacher in late 1950s’ Manchester. He would go on to become literary editor and theatre critic of the Observer.
Benny Green
Type

Judge

Benny Green

Benny Green was a jazz musician and broadcaster. Once, after appearing on television wearing dark glasses to counteract the studio lights, he received fan mail addressed to ‘the blind sax player’.
Lord Asa Briggs
Type

Judge

Asa Briggs

Asa Briggs, who died in 2016, was a historian who, as a young university fellow, was once given the task of proof-reading Winston Churchill’s four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
At the time of the prize, Brian Wenham was Controller of BBC2, where he was renowned for his laid-back approach and astrakhan hat. Under his watch, the station’s viewing figures rose by 50%.
Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalin is one of Britain’s most eminent biographers. At the time of the 1980 prize, however, she had published just one book, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Margaret Forster
Margaret Forster wrote one of the defining novels of the 1960s, Georgy Girl, a best-seller that which was made into a hit and also inspired the eponymous earworm from The Seekers.
Ronald Blythe
Ronald Blythe, who turns 100 in 2022, is a distinguished writer, anthologist and ruralist whose rootedness in the Suffolk countryside has proved an inspiration for the new generation of nature writers.
David Daiches
David Daiches, who died in 2005, was a prolific literary critic, biographer and writer. Although he was born in Sunderland to a Lithuanian Jewish family he identified as a proud Scotsman.
Hermione Lee
Dame Hermione Lee is a professor of literature at Oxford University and a literary biographer of repute, specialising in American and women writers. She was chair of the Booker Prize judges in 2006.