Who's Who

Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster. She has written on the history and role of the media in politics, wars, revolutions, religion and childhood, including Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (with James Curran) and has recently published Carnage and the Media: the Making and Reporting of News about Violence, and (with John Lloyd) What Can Be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better. She is working on the Official History of the BBC between 1974-1987. She is reports editor of Political Quarterly, was married to Ben Pimlott, lives in London and has three sons.

• The Political Quarterly Homepage
• Jean Seaton Homepage at the University of Westminster

D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, After the War: The Novel and England since 1945 and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled 'Projections of the Inner "I": George Orwell's Fiction'. 

In 2008, he succeeded Sir Bernard Crick to become the second Chair of the Orwell Trust. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich.

• Comment is Free Articles by D. J. Taylor
• Orwell: The (Brief) Life A short biography by D. J. Taylor
• Orwell Biography Orwell's latest biographer discusses what motivated him, and provides a short history of Orwell biography.

Sir Bernard Crick instituted the George Orwell Memorial Trust with the royalties from the hardback version of his Orwell: A Life, one of the definitive biographies of the man born Eric Blair. In 1993, he launched the Orwell Prize in its present form, and served as chair of the judges until the 2006 Prize.

He is Emeritus Professor of Birkbeck College, University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of the Politics Department of Edinburgh University since moving to Edinburgh in 1984. He began his teaching career as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, taught at McGill for a year before returning to teach at the LSE from 1956 to 1967 and was the first professor of Politics at Sheffield from 1967 to 1973, thereafter at Birkbeck. His publications include The American Science of Politics, The Reform of Parliament, In Defence of Politics, Essays on Politics and Literature, Political Thoughts and Polemics, To Make the Scottish Parliament a Model for Democracy (with David Miller), Essays on Citizenship, and Democracy: a Very Short Introduction. He is currently working on a book on ‘the Four Nations’.

For many years editor of The Political Quarterly, he was joint founder of the Study of Parliament Group, first president of the Politics Association (teachers) in the 1970s and recently President of the Association for Citizenship Teaching. A Vice-President of the Political Studies Association, in 1997 he became chairman of the advisory group whose report The Teaching of Citizenship and Democracy in Schools led to the introduction of Citizenship in the English National Curriculum. In 2001 he chaired the 'Life in the UK' Advisory Group, set up to advise the Home Secretary on the method, conduct and implementation of a 'Life in the United Kingdom' naturalisation test, publishing their report in 2003 as The New and the Old. He was adviser on Active Citizenship to the Home Office from 2003-04. He formally inaugurated UCL's Department of Political Science in May 2005.

Sir Bernard stepped down as both Chair of the Orwell Trust, and as an Orwell Trustee, in May 2008.

• Wikipedia Sir Bernard Crick biography
• Comment is Free Articles by Sir Bernard Crick
• Orwell as a Comic Writer One of Orwell's foremost biographers looks at the satire and humour in Orwell's work.
• Journalisted Articles by Sir Bernard Crick

I first became involved with the Orwell Prize many years ago. It had been set up and organised by Sir Bernard Crick for a number of years prior to my coming on board. The awards had grown in stature and were taking on a life of their own. It became obvious that more people needed to be involved in organising the whole affair. Whilst I was happy to allow those with better connections than I when it comes to recognising the right people to get involved with the awards, I am very much in favour of it going onwards and upwards as Orwell's relevance is still as important today as it was when he was alive. It is to this end that I will do all in my power to help acheive the status that the awards deserve.

Bill Hamilton joined A. M. Heath in 1982 after 3 years working for Secker & Warburg. He represents literary and commercial writers of fiction and non-fiction from the UK and US.

• A. M. Heath Homepage

Barbara Hardy (FRS, FBA) is Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck, University of London and Honorary Professor at the University of Wales, Swansea. A critic of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Victorian and twentieth-century literature, she has also written a novel, London Lovers (Peter Owen), a memoir of Welsh working-class childhood, Swansea Girl (Peter Owen and Seren), Severn Bridge: New and Selected Poems and The Yellow Carpet: New and Selected Poems (Shoestring). Her most recent work is George Eliot: A Critic's Biography (Continuum), and a new book, Dickens and Creativity, will be published in 2008. An admirer of Orwell, she has been a member of the Orwell Trust since its inception and has previously been a judge for the Orwell Prize.

• British Academy Fellowship Homepage

Eric Hobsbawm was born 1917 and lives in London. He is an historian and writer who has taught in London and various parts of the world, and Professor Emeritus of Economic and Social History of the University of London. He is the author of a number of historical books and an autobiography. At present, he is president of Birkbeck College, University of London.

• Wikipedia Eric Hobsbawm biography
• Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War Essay

Blake Morrison was born in Skipton, Yorkshire, but has lived in south-east London since the 1970s. His books include two collections of poems, Dark Glasses and The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper; two bestselling memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me; a historical novel about Gutenberg, a collection of stories and essays, and a children’s book. With the actor and director Barrie Rutter he has adapted several plays for the theatre company Northern Broadsides, the latest of which, Lisa’s Sex Strike (a version of Lysistrata), appeared at venues throughout the country this autumn, including a week at Greenwich Theatre in October. He has also written the librettos for three operas, working with Atom Egoyan, Gavin Bryars and Robert Lepage.

Formerly literary editor of the Observer and Independent on Sunday, Blake is now Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, London. His latest book is a novel, South of the River, published in March 2007. The film version of And When Did You Last See Your Father?, starring Jim Broadbent, Julet Stevenson and Colin Firth, came out in October 2007.

• Blake Morrison Homepage
• Blake Morrison Homepage at Goldsmiths College
• Journalisted Articles by Blake Morrison

Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. He is an award-winning novelist and a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine. In his acclaimed first book, The Missing (1995), O'Hagan wrote about his own childhood and told the stories of parents whose children had disappeared. The book was shortlisted for the Esquire Award, the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award, and the McVities Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year award. Part of the book was adapted for radio and television as Calling Bible John and won a BAFTA award.

Our Fathers (1999), his first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Personality (2003), about a 13-year-old girl with a beautiful singing voice growing up above a chip shop on the Scottish island of Bute and making ready to realise her family's dream of fame, won the 2003 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). In 2003 Andrew O'Hagan was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2004 he edited The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta, a collection of various writers' accounts of Kolkata. His latest novel is Be Near Me (2006).

• Wikipedia Andrew O'Hagan biography
• Journalisted Articles by Andrew O'Hagan
• London Review of Books Homepage

Alan Plater is a prolific playwright and screenwriter. Born in Jarrow, his works are often associated with the north of England. His first television play, The Referees, appeared on the BBC in 1961, and subsequent screen credits include (but are by no means limited to!) Z Cars, television plays including The Villains, the Beiderbecke trilogy, Misterioso, television adaptations of Trollope, film scripts including The Virgin and the Gypsy, and more recent telelvision productions including Midsomer Murders and The Last of the Blonde Bombeshells. Having previously produced the television play Orwell on Jura (1983), in 1997 Plater adapted Keep the Aspidistra Flying for the screen.

He served as president of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain from September 1991 until April 1995, and in the New Year's Honours List of 2004 he was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to Drama. Plater currently lives in London with his wife Shirley Rubinstein. He has three grandchildren living in Yorkshire, and five in Newcastle as well as various others scattered around the globe.

• Wikipedia Alan Plater biography
• IMDb Alan Plater's filmography

Polly Toynbee is a political and social commentator on The Guardian. She was the Social Affairs Editor at the BBC, and has worked for the Observer, The Independent and The Washington Monthly (USA). Her books include: A Working Life, a study of unskilled work; Hospital, a study of the NHS; Lost Children: Stroy of Adopted Children Searching for Their Mothers; and, more recently, Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain. Together with David Walker she wrote Did Things Get Better?: An Audit of Labour's Successes and Failures and Better or Worse?: Has Labour Delivered? auditing Labour's first two terms.

She has won the Orwell Prize, Columnist of the Year at the National Press Awards and the Political Studies Association's Political Journalist of the Year award. She is president of the Social Policy Association, and Chair of the Brighton and Hove Arts Festival. She is a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and sits on the board of the Political Quarterly. She has four children and lives in Lambeth.

• Wikipedia Polly Toynbee biography
• Journalisted Articles by Polly Toynbee
• The Political Quarterly Homepage

Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols. She was born in London in 1946, of an Italian mother and an English father who was a bookseller. Marina Warner was educated in Cairo, Brussels, Berkshire, England, and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

Her many award-winning studies of mythology and fairy-tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994) and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998), while recent studies include Fantastic Metamorphoses: Other Worlds (2002), and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006), a study of phantasms and modern technologies. Her essays have been collected in Signs & Wonders (2004), and the forthcoming The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought: Essays on Art.

Her fiction includes the novels The Lost Father (1988, short-listed for the Booker), Indigo (1992), and The Leto Bundle (2000), and many short stories. She is currently working on a memoir-cum-novel, inspired by her father’s bookshop in Cairo in the Fifties, and continuing her research into fairy-tales and magic with a study of the idea of the orient, Stranger Magic.

Since 2004, she has been Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. The British Academy elected her a Fellow in 2005, and Oxford University, St Andrew’s, Kent, Leicester and others have given her honorary degrees. She has curated several exhibitions, most recently Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing (2005). She is a Vice-President of the National Council for One-Parent Families, and a patron of Reprieve, the Hypatia Trust, the Hosking Houses Trust and others. She lives in London and Oxford.

• Marina Warner Official homepage