Authors

Hanif Kureishi CBE is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker. His screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Academy Award and his book The Buddha of Suburbia won the 1990 Whitbread Award for best novel. His 2006 screenplay Venus received Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and in 2008 he was appointed CBE. His latest book Something To Tell You – “a vital, teeming, panoramic, immersive novel” (Time Out) – was published last year.
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One of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers. British Book Awards Author of the Year 2003. Waterstone’s Author of the Year 2003. Winner of the Somerset Maugham prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2002. Shortlisted for the Orange, Man Booker and Mail on Sunday/John Llewelyn Rhys prizes… Sarah Waters’ impressive list of literary achievements is too long to list in full here – but suffice it to say we’re thrilled to welcome her to the Port Eliot Festival this year.
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With worldwide sales of over 10 million, Jung Chang is responsible for exposing Communist China from beneath the veil to the Western world and beyond. Her autobiography Wild Swans, which was banned in her native China, is held up as a benchmark in family saga.
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Alain de Botton is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and public speaker, whose books have sold in millions around the world. Described as a “philosopher of everyday life”, he has covered subjects from art to architecture and from love to travel.
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Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House (Bloomsbury, 2008) – hailed as "a classic" by John Le Carré – won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in 2008, and has been storming the book charts this year. She also wrote the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, a biography of British power boat racer Betty ‘Joe’ Carstairs, winner of the 1998 Somerset Maugham award and shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Biography award.
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Writer, poet and playwright, Glyn has won several awards for his poetry, including the Somerset Maugham Prize, the E. M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
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Rana worked for a marketing consultancy in London and New York for a few years before moving to Delhi to write. His debut novel, Tokyo Cancelled, a 13-part story cycle, was published in 2005 to critical acclaim and has been translated into nine languages.
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Caroline was recently shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was the youngest writer on the list at 22. She has also won an Eric Gregory Award (2002) and the Foyle Young Poet of the Year award two years running (1999, 2000), and was a winner of the Poetry London Competition in 2007, the Peterloo Poetry Competition in 2004, 2003 and 2002.
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Enjoy a Monstrous Moonshine cocktail with award-winning author, Alexander Masters, as he talks about his upcoming book. Glowing under ultraviolet light and full of dry ice, Alexander will be mixing up “a stinker of a cocktail” which is sure to compliment the conversation.
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Kit Berry is the author of The Stonewylde Series, which is rapidly gaining cult status. She is a pagan and passionate about our folklore heritage, which features strongly in her novels.
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