Authors

2023 Clapham Book Festival Authors

Melvyn, Baron Bragg CH, HonFRS, FRSL, FBA is an arts polymath, broadcaster and writer. He is a novelist, for adults and children, a writer of non-fiction, a playwright and writer for the screen (collaborating with director Ken Russell). His memoir is Back in the Day (Sceptre, 2023). He has worked throughout his life with the BBC, though is widely known for his work with ITV on The South Bank Show, a long-running arts programme which he conceived, wrote and presented.  He currently presents the R4 academic discussion programme In Our Time. His books have also been awarded the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award, and have been longlisted three times for the Booker Prize. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including The Adventure of English and The Book of Books about the King James Bible. He lives in London and Cumbria.

Simon Brett OBE FRSL is responsible for the Charles Paris, Mrs Pargeter, Fethering and Blotto & Twinks series of crime novels He was awarded an OBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours ‘for services to literature’, as well as elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He won the prestigious CWA Diamond Dagger in 2014, one of the highest accolades in the crime writing world. He is equally well-known as a screenwriter and producer, writing comedy for series such as No Commitments and After Henry. His credits include I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Just A Minute for radio and Molesworth and The Glums for television. He was also responsible for bringing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to R4.

Nicola Williams started her career as a barrister in private practice, specialising in Criminal Law. She was a member of the first Independent Advisory Group to the Metropolitan Police Service (following recommendations arising from the Stephen Lawrence Report [1999]). She has been a part-time Crown Court Judge since 2010. As well as crime writing (her latest is Until Proven Innocent), she is an active volunteer for Speakers for Schools, a charity which encourages young people from disadvantaged and under-represented communities to achieve their full career potential.

Tom Sutcliffe is a British journalist and arts broadcaster. He is one of the main presenters of Front Row, an arts review programme, and of Start the Week, a Monday morning programme, both broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He also presented the BBC Radio 4 arts show Saturday Review from 1999, and until 2022 was chairman of Round Britain Quiz. He is the author of The Faber Book of Opera and Believing in Opera.

Peter Kemp is the chief fiction critic of The Sunday Times and was Fiction Editor for the newspaper between 1994 and 2010. A former theatre reviewer for The Independent, he has reviewed fiction for the paper for over 40 years and is the author of a study of HG Wells.  His book Retroland is a guide to the current literary landscape and its novelistic preoccupation with history, from the imperial and the political to the personal and the literary.

Elizabeth Buchan* Clapham-based novelist and co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival, Elizabeth’s latest novel in a highly successful writing career is Two Women of Rome. Her writing has garnered much praise:  ‘Skill and elegance… no one writes a cliff hanger scene like Buchan’ according to The Week and E.C. Fremantle said ‘Buchan has a gift for understanding the complexity and ambiguity of human emotions’.

 

Julie Anderson* is  co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival.  Her latest crime thriller Opera was long listed for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2023. It is the third in the series which began with Plague ‘A fascinating and authoritative insider view of modern power politics that is all too frighteningly prescient’ according to V B Grey. 

Ivy Ngeow Novelist and short story writer Ivy Ngeow was brought up in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. She holds an MA in Writing from Middlesex University, where she won the 2005 Middlesex University Literary Prize. Her debut, Cry of the Flying Rhino (2017), was awarded the International Proverse Prize in Hong Kong. Her later novels include Heart of Glass, Overboard and White Crane Strikes. Her fifth novel The American Boyfriend is a psychological thriller that was longlisted for the Avons x Mushens Entertainment Prize for Commercial Fiction 2022 and was published in July 2023. She lives in London and works as the commissioning editor of the Asian Anthology New Writing series.

Sarah Bax Horton is a true crime writer, researcher and analyst, who previously served in the Foreign Office.  Born in South Wales in 1968, and educated at Monmouth, she graduated with a Master of Arts Honours degree in English and German from Somerville College, Oxford. She  is the great, great granddaughter of a policeman who worked on the Jack the Ripper case. Her new book, One-Armed Jack; Uncovering the real Jack the Ripper presents a fresh analysis of the case and names the man who she believes is the perpetrator.  She lives in London.

Previous Clapham Book Festival Authors

Kate Adie National and international award-winning TV and radio reporter and former Chief News Correspondent for the BBC  Kate Adie has covered some of the most memorable and momentous events across the globe. She is the long running presenter of Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent and has been a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Costa Prize. Her latest publication Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in WWI has garnered wide-spread praise.

Rosanna Amaka Rosanna’s debut novel The Book of Echoes was short-listed for the HWA Debut Crown 2021. She began writing to give voice to the Brixton community in which she grew up, a community fast disappearing as a result of gentrification, emigration to the Caribbean and Africa or with the passing away of the older generation. Her most recent book is Rose and the Burma Sky set in World War Two.

Laura Barnett* Best-selling author of The Versions of Us, Laura Barnett, who was born and grew up in Clapham, appeared at the Book Festival 2016 in Clapham Library. Her latest novel Greatest Hits was published in June 2017.

Matthew Beaumont*  Professor at University College, London, Matthew is also the author of a number of books on literature, including Nightwalking; A Nocturnal History of London. Matthew took part in the discussion Place & the Writer at Clapham Book Festival 2016.

Sir Antony Beevor  The eminent historian, was  elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and the Royal Historical Society in 2017. In 2014 he received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, and in 2016 the Norton Medlicott Medal for Service to History. He was awarded a knighthood in the 2017 New Year’s Honours List.  He is also Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur de l’Ordre de la Couronne.  His books have received many prestigious awards and prizes.

Dr Piers Brendon is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire and, most recently, Eminent Elizabethans. He also writes for television and contributes frequently to the national press. Formerly Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Ursula Buchan is an award-winning journalist, who now concentrates mainly on social and cultural history but has written the definitive biography of her grandfather John Buchan. Best known for The Thirty-Nine Steps, ‘JB’ was an intriguing personality, a scholar, antiquarian, barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, literary critic, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, member of parliament and imperial proconsul – given a state funeral when he died, a deeply admired and loved Governor-General of Canada.

Natasha Cooper Crime writer and former Chair of the Crime Writers Association, Natasha Cooper’s sleuth Trish MacGuire has featured in a series of nine books, her civil servant detective Willow King in seven and her forensic psychologist Dr Karen Taylor in four.  She reviews crime fiction for The Literary Review.  She is a former Clapham resident.

Emma Darwin Emma was born and brought up in London and now lives near Clapham.  Her first novel The Mathematics of Love was listed for the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book and the Romantic Novelists’ Book of the Year. Her second, A Secret Alchemy, was a Sunday Times bestseller.  She blogs regularly at This Itch of Writing, giving useful suggestions for aspiring authors and advice about the publishing industry.

Bobbie Derbyshire* Bobbie is a novelist and writer based in south London. She appeared at the 2016 Clapham Book Festival with her insightful lecture  Where Do Novels Come From at Clapham Library. Her latest novel is The Posthumous Adventures of Harry Whitaker ( Sandstone, 2019).

Dame Margaret Drabble Dame Margaret Drabble is the distinguished and prize-winning author of many novels, most recently, The Dark Flood Rises, exploring aging and death (“…but there’s nothing grim about it” said The Washington Post). She has also written biographies and screenplays and was awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature. 

Sabine Durrant Novelist and journalist, her best selling Lie with Me, a taut, character-driven psychological thriller, was a Richard & Judy Book Club Choice.  Her latest novel Sun Damage was published in June 2022. Sabine appeared at both the 2016 and 2017 editions of the Clapham Book Festival.

Aida Edemariam won the Ondaatje Prize 2019 for The Wife’s Tale, her “outstanding and highly unusual memoir” of her indomitable Ethiopian grandmother. Lovingly researched, the story moves from Yetemegnu’s birth to her marriage (at the age of eight) to a cleric and poet two decades her senior, through fascist occupation, the rise and fall of Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war.

Elizabeth Fremantle Author of bestselling novels set in the Tudor and Jacobean periods, her book Queens’s Gambit was recently turned into a film ‘Firebrand’.  Her latest novel is Disobedient, based on the life and work of Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

Frank Gardner OBE        A scholar of the Middle East and the Arab world and BBC correspondent in the region – he was shot by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, which left him confined to a wheelchair – he initially put pen to paper in a riveting memoir, Blood & Sand. His first thriller, Crisis, was published in 2016 and was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Michael Glover* is a Sheffield-born poet, art critic and editor of The Bow-Wow Shop, an international poetry forum. Now based in Clapham, his collections of poetry include Impossible Horizons, Amidst all this Debris, For the Sheer Hell of Living and Only So Much. His memoir of growing up in Sheffield, Headlong into Pennilessness, was published in 2011.

Isabelle Grey Novelist Isabelle Grey appeared at the 2016 Clapham Book Festival  in the discussion Crime in the Afternoon. She is the creator of Di Grace Fisher. Isabelle’s latest novel Sisterhood was published in 2021.  ‘A heart-rending exploration of the effect on one family of secrets kept for too long‘ according to Carolyn Kirby. She lives in Dulwich.

Henry Hemming* London-born Henry Hemming is the author of five works of non-fiction including M, or Agent M in the US, In Search of the English Eccentric, Misadventure in the Middle East (shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book Award), and Churchill’s Iceman, published in the US as The Ingenious Mr Pyke, where it became a New York Times bestseller. He has also written for The Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, The Times, The Economist, FT Magazine and The Washington Post.

Philip Gwyn Jones Philip Gwyn Jones is a seasoned editor and publisher with 25 years’ high experience at the heart of literary publishing in the UK. His early career was at HarperCollins UK, first as editorial director of Fontana Press and then as publisher of Flamingo. More recently, he was Executive Publisher at Granta and Portobello Books (which he founded in 2004) and is currently Editor-at-Large at ScribeUK, where he buys both fiction and non-fiction.

Vaseem Khan Vaseem Khan writes the bestselling Malabar House crime novels set in 1950s Bombay. The first, Midnight at Malabar House won the prestigious  CWA Historical Dagger Award. He also wrote the  Baby Ganesh Detective Agency  crime series featuring contemporary Indian detective Ashwin Chopra and his baby elephant sidekick.  Vaseem is the current  Chair of the Crime Writers Association and Director of the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Fiction Prize. He is one half of the Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast and works at UCL Department of Security and Crime Science.

Patrice Lawrence Brought up in an Italian-Trinidadian family in mid-Sussex, Patrice Lawrence now lives in East London.  Her debut young adult novel Orangeboy won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2017, The Bookseller YA Book Prize 2017 and was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Award in 2016. Her second novel Indigo Donut was Book of the Week in The Times, the Observer and The Sunday Times.

 Mark Lawson A noted journalist, broadcaster and author, Mark Lawson specialises in culture and the arts and is best known for presenting the flagship BBC R4 arts programme Front Row from 1998-2014. He has also written for The Universe, The Times, The Guardian and The Independent.  Twice voted TV Critic of the Year as well as winning many other journalism awards, he currently presents Mark Lawson Talks To… on BBC Four.

Andrew Lownie  Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess won the St Ermin’s Intelligence Book of the Year award. ‘A magnificent biography…Burgess has all the right ingredients for an engrossing story and Lownie, who has spent 30 years researching this biography, makes the most of it… a narrative as gripping as a thriller.’ – Daily Express. Andrew Lownie is President of the Biographer’s Club and sits on the board of Biographer’s International Association.

Deborah Moggach OBE A novelist and screenwriter, Deborah has written eighteen novels, including The Ex-Wives, Tulip Fever (being made into the film of the same name), These Foolish Things (renamed as the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and Heartbreak Hotel.  She now mixes film and book writing with journalism. She is also a former Chair of the Society of Authors and worked for PEN’s Executive Committee, as well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Clare Mulley Clare is the award-winning author of three biographies: The Women Who Flew for Hitler, The Spy Who Loved and The Woman Who Saved the Children, a biography of the controversial Save the Children founder Eglantyne Jebb. As well as media appearances, Clare writes and reviews for The Spectator, The Telegraph and History Today, and was chair of judges for the Historical Writers Association 2017 non-fiction prize. She is a former Clapham resident.

Dame  Jenni Murray  DBE Broadcaster, journalist and writer, she presented BBC R4’s Woman’s Hour for more than thirty years.  She has written numerous acclaimed books including A History of the World in 21 Women and Fat Cow, Fat Chance; the science and psychology of size. She has honorary degrees from a number of universities.

Abir Mukherjee is The Times bestselling author of the Wyndham & Banerjee series of crime novels set in Raj-era India which have sold over 250,000 copies and been translated into 15 languages. His books have won numerous awards including the CWA Dagger for best Historical Novel, the Prix du Polar Européen, the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing and the Amazon Publishing Readers Award for E-book for the Year.

Daljit Nagra Daljit Nagra was born and brought up in West London and Sheffield and now lives in London, teaching poetry at Brunel University. His award-winning poetry includes Oh my Rub! published under the pseudonym Khan Singh Kumar and Look We Have Coming to Dover! (which brought him Forward Prizes in 2004 and 2007 for best Single Poem and Best Collection), and Tipoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! was shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize. Daljit was BBC R4’s first Poet in Residence. He is Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.

Annemarie Neary* is an award-winning Irish-born novelist and short story writer. Her crime writing debut novel Sirens has attracted widespread praise.  ‘A nail-bitingly tense tale, with writing as sharp and pointed as arrows, where nobody is who they say they are …‘ – Sunday Independent.  Her latest novel The Orphans is a taut, psychological thriller set on Clapham Common.

Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House (which won the W H Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). Her memoir Paper Houses was BBC R4’s Book of the Week in 2007 and she has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud-stories of sex and love. Half English and half French, Michèle splits her time between London and the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Rick Stroud Historian and author, his critically acclaimed books include Kidnap in Crete; The True Story of the Abduction of a Nazi General and The Phantom Army of Alamein; The Men who Hood-winked Rommel. ‘A wonderful book: charming, fascinating, crammed full of extraordinary nuggets of information … The result is a gem of a book and a classic of its kind.’ – Literary Review. His latest book Lonely Courage tells the story of the SOE heroines in occupied France.

John Taylor* John  is a Clapham-based novelist and co-founder of the Clapham Book festival. He appeared in Readers Afternoon at the Festival 2016. His novel Departing Vienna is set in contemporary London and war-time Europe; he has also written military history.

Jane Thynne Novelist, journalist and frequent broadcaster on BBC R4, Jane Thynne’s Clara Vine series – including the latest Solitaire – about a  British spy in Nazi Germany is highly praised.  ‘Absorbing fiction, the sort you might happily read on a beach… it’s pacey well put-together reading….Those who like a good serving of history with their novels will be deeply satisfied. Thynne has a journalist’s magpie eye for interesting asides and the fruits of her research pack each page.‘ – The Times.

Professor Kate Williams        combines an incisive grasp of historical research with a fine talent as a storyteller. Fascinated by powerful women, her biographies have featured Josephine Bonaparte, Emma Hamilton and Queen Victoria, as well as the rivalry between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I portrayed in Rival Queens. She also writes historical fiction in her three-part historical saga about the glamorous but doomed de Witt family. Kate is the social historian on BBC2’s Restoration Home, the royal and historical expert for CNN and appears regularly on TV and radio. She has also covered all the major royal events.

*Denotes Clapham writers or writers based in Clapham.

Ursula Buchan is photographed by Charlie Hodgkinson, 2016