1. Modern English Literature

2. Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coe was born on 19 August 1961 in Lickey, a suburb of south-west Birmingham. His father worked in the motor industry as a research physicist; his mother was a music and PE teacher. Jonathan began writing at an early age. His first surviving story, a detective thriller called The Castle of Mystery, was written at the age of eight. The first few pages of this story appear in What a Carve Up. He continued writing all through his schooldays, and at the age of fifteen sent his first full-length novel to a publisher. A few years later, after re-reading this book (a comedy entitled All The Way) he felt so embarrassed by it that he burnt it on a bonfire in his parents' back garden.

3. He went to King Edward's school in Birmingham, and from there to Trinity College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge he wrote numerous short stories and another novel, The Sunset Bell. He then went on to Warwick University where he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. While working on this thesis he also completed The Accidental Woman, which was the first of his novels to be accepted for publication. It was published in the UK by Duckworth in April In the late 1980s Jonathan moved to London to pursue his literary and musical enthusiasms, writing songs for his short-lived band The Peer Group and an even shorter-lived feminist cabaret group called Wanda and the Willy Warmers. When it became obvious that his talents did not lie in a musical direction, he decided to concentrate exclusively on writing, publishing A Touch of Love in 1989 and The Dwarves of Death in He now began work on his most ambitious novel to date, What a Carve Up. Not having any advance from a publisher, he supported the writing of it with two short biographies of film stars: Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It (1991) and James Stewart: Leading Man (1994). The novel was completed in early 1993 and published by Penguin books one year later. It became his first international success, with translations in sixteen languages.

4. It was followed by The House of Sleep (1997), The Rotters' Club (2001), The Closed Circle(2004) and The Rain Before It Falls (2007). Jonathan also spent many years during this period researching and writing a biography of B S Johnson, the famous British experimental novelist of the 1960s. This biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, was published by Picador in 2004.
Among Jonathan's awards are the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for What a Carve Up in 1995, the Prix Médicis Étranger for The House of Sleep in 1998, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for The Rotters' Club in 2001, and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Like a Fiery Elephant in In 2004 he was made Chevalier l'Ordre des Arts and des Lettres.
His ninth novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, was published in the UK in May Jonathan lives in London with his wife and two daughters.

5. Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry was born in Hampstead, London, to Marianne Eve (Newman) and Alan Fry, a physicist and inventor. His maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants, while his father's family was of English background. He grew up in Norfolk and attended Uppingham School and Stout's Hill. After his notorious three months in Pucklechurch prison for credit card fraud, he attended Queens College, Cambridge in 1979, finishing with a 2:1 in English in 1981/2. While at Cambridge, he was a member of the Cherubs drinking club, and Footlights with Thompson, Tony Slattery, Martin Bergman, and Hugh Laurie (to whom he was introduced by E.T.). His prolific writing partnership with Laurie began in 1981 with resulting Footlights revues for (among others) Mayweek, Edinburgh Festival, and a three month tour of Australia. In 1984, Fry was engaged to do the rewrite of the Noel Gay musical "Me and My Girl," which made him a millionaire before the age of 30. It also earned him a nomination for a Tony award in (Sidenote: It was upon SF's suggestion that Emma Thompson landed a leading role in the London cast of this show.) Throughout the 1980s, Fry did a huge amount of television and radio work, as well as writing for newspapers (e.g. a weekly column in the "Daily Telegraph") and magazines (e.g. articles for "Arena"). He is probably best known for his television roles in The Black Adder 2 (1986) and Jeeves and Wooster (1990).

6. His support of the Terence Higgins Trust through events such as the first "Hysteria" benefit, as well as numerous other charity efforts, are probably those works of which he is most proud. Fry's acting career has not been limited to films and television. He had successful runs in Alan Bennett's "Forty Years On," Simon Gray's "The Common Pursuit" with John Sessions, Rik Mayall, John Gordon Sinclair, and others. Michael Frayn's "Look Look" and Gray's "Cell Mates" were less successful for both Fry and their playwrights, the latter not helped by his walking out of the play after only a couple of weeks. Fry has published four novels as well as a collection of his radio and journalistic miscellanea. He has recorded audiotapes of his novels (an unabridged version of "The Liar" was released in 1995), as well as many other works for both adults and children.

7. Joanne Harris
Joanne Harris (MBE) was born in Barnsley in 1964, of a French mother and an English father. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge and was a teacher for fifteen years, during which time she published three novels, including Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.
Since then, she has written 15 more novels, two collections of short stories, a Dr Who novella, guest episodes for the game Zombies, Run and three cookbooks. Her books are now published in over 50 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has honorary doctorates in literature from the universities of Sheffield and Huddersfield, and has been a judge for the Whitbread Prize, the Orange Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science.

8. Her hobbies are listed in Who’s Who as: “mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion of the system”, although she also enjoys obfuscation, sleaze, rebellion, witchcraft, armed robbery, tea and biscuits. She is not above bribery and would not necessarily refuse an offer involving exotic travel or pink champagne. She works from a shed in her garden, plays bass in the band she first joined when she was 16, is currently writing a screenplay and lives with her husband and daughter in a little wood in Yorkshire.

9. John Boyne
He was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1971, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where he was awarded the Curtis Brown prize. John now offer a scholarship to Irish students undertaking the MA (Management Associate) programme at UEA (University of East Anglia).
He’s published 9 novels for adults and five for younger readers, including The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas which was a New York Times no.1 Bestseller and was made into a Miramax feature film. It has sold more than 6 million copies worldwide. John is also the author of the short story collection Beneath The Earth.
He is a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times and have been a judge for both the Hennessy Literary Awards and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, as well as chairing the jury for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

10. In 2012, John was awarded the Hennessy Literary ‘Hall of Fame’ Award for his body of work. He has also won 3 Irish Book Awards, for Children’s Book of the Year, People’s Choice Book of the Year and Short Story of the Year. John has won a number of international literary awards, including the Que Leer Award for Novel of the Year in Spain and the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany. In 2015, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia.
His novels are published in 51 languages.
A new novel, THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES, will be published in the UK in February 2017.

11. J. K. Rowling
British writer Joanne Kathleen Rowling, born July 31, 1965, is the creator of the wildly successful Harry Potter book series. Rowling attended (1976–1982) Wyedean Comprehensive School in Chepstow, England. She studied French at the University of Exeter (B.A., 1987) and, after studying in Paris, went on to work for Amnesty International in London. Rowling reported that she was on a train when she began to imagine the first book of the series. She later said, "Harry just strolled into my head fully formed."
In 1991, Rowling moved to Oporto, Portugal, where she taught English as a second language. She married a Portuguese journalist, with whom she had a daughter. She then moved to Scotland in 1994 and finished her first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in The book was published by Bloomsbury Children's Books in 1997 and in the United States by Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic Press in 1998 (where it was renamed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone).

12. Rowling went on to write six more Harry Potter books
Rowling went on to write six more Harry Potter books. All in the series were illustrated by Mary GrandPré. Film versions were made for all of them (8 movies, with the final book split into two films). The Harry Potter books proved to be a worldwide publishing phenomenon; new editions were greeted by millions of fans, some of whom waited in costume for a midnight release. Rowling also wrote Quidditch through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (both 2001).
In 2007, Rowling produced seven individual copies of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a volume of five fairy tales left to the character of Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows(2007). One of the seven copies was auctioned at Sotheby's in London. It sold for £1.95 million (about $4 million); all proceeds went to The Children's Voice campaign, a charity Rowling co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe. The book went on sale to the general public in December In 2011, Rowling announced a new Harry Potter website called Pottermore, which features new and previously unpublished material about the world of Harry Potter. The Casual Vacancy (2012) is a novel aimed at adult readers.
J.K. Rowling lives in Edinburgh with her husband and three children.

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