WAlfred Austin was an English poet who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, after an interval following the death of Tennyson, when the other candidates had either caused controversy or refused the honour. It was claimed that he was being rewarded for his support for the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury in the General Election of 1895. Austin's poems are little-remembered today, his most popular work being prose idylls celebrating nature.
WAlan Bennett is an English actor, author, playwright, and screenwriter. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University, where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full-time, his first stage play, Forty Years On, being produced in 1968.
WRebecca Burlend (1793–1872) is the author of A True Picture of Emigration, a journal and guide written during the period of 1831–1845. She published it anonymously in 1848, receiving credit for the work in 1936.
WWilliam Congreve was an English playwright and poet of the Restoration period. He is known for his clever, satirical dialogue and influence on the comedy of manners style of that period. He was also a minor political figure in the British Whig Party.
WThomas William Hodgson Crosland was a British author, poet and journalist.
WCatherine Lucy Czerkawska, is a Scottish-based novelist and playwright. She has written many plays for the stage and for BBC Radio 4 and has published numerous novels and short stories. Wormwood – about the Chernobyl disaster – was produced at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1997, while her novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize in 2005.
WFr. Frederick William Faber C.O. was a noted English hymn writer and theologian, who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1845. He was ordained to the Catholic priesthood subsequently in 1847. His best-known work is Faith of Our Fathers.
WHelen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirty something singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love. Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) were published in 40 countries and sold more than 15 million copies. The two films of the same name achieved international success. In a survey conducted by The Guardian newspaper, Bridget Jones’s Diary was named as one of the ten novels that best defined the 20th century.
WRose George is an English journalist and author. She began writing in 1994, as an intern at The Nation magazine in New York City. Later, she became senior editor and writer at COLORS magazine, the bilingual "global magazine about local cultures" published in eighty countries and based first in Rome, then Paris, then Venice. In 1999, she moved to London and began a freelance career and has since written for the Independent on Sunday, Arena, the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Details, Bad Idea and others. Along the way, she has been war correspondent in Kosovo for Condé Nast Traveler magazine and was twice a guest at Saddam Hussein's birthday party. Until 2010, she was senior editor at large for Tank, a quarterly magazine of fashion, art, reportage, and culture based in London.
WBrenda Marjorie Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond is a British judge who served as President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2017 until her retirement in 2020, and serves as a member of the House of Lords as a Lord Temporal.
WWillis Edward Hall was an English playwright and radio, television and film writer who drew on his working-class roots in Leeds for much of his writing. Willis formed an extremely prolific partnership with his life-long friend Keith Waterhouse producing over 250 works. He wrote plays such as Billy Liar, The Long and the Short and the Tall, and Celebration; the screenplays for Whistle Down the Wind, A Kind of Loving and Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain; and television programmes including Budgie, Worzel Gummidge and Minder. His passion for musical theatre led to a string of hits, including Wind in the Willows, The Card, and George Stiles' and Anthony Drewe's Peter Pan: A Musical Adventure.
WWilliam Fryer Harvey AM, known as W. F. Harvey, was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the macabre and horror genres. Among his best-known stories are "August Heat" and "The Beast with Five Fingers", described by horror historian Les Daniels as "minor masterpieces".
WAnna Mary Hawthorn Kitson Clark,, married name Mary Chitty, was an English archaeologist, curator, and independent scholar. She specialised in the archaeology of Romano-British Northern England but was also involved in excavations outside the United Kingdom and the Roman period. Her 1935 work, A Gazetteer of Roman Remains in East Yorkshire, "remains one of the starting points for any study of the Romans in the north of England".
WGeorge Linley, was an English verse-writer and musical composer, who was born in Leeds. He contributed verses to the local newspapers and published some pamphlets, before leaving his native city in early life. After a period of military service, he lived at first in Edinburgh but finally settled in London, where he gained a reputation as a writer and composer of songs and ballads. He is perhaps best known for writing the English lyrics to the song, "God Bless the Prince of Wales".
WLucy Newlyn is a poet and academic. She is Emeritus Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, having retired as professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 2016.
WIvan Noble was a British journalist who worked for BBC News Online, and became well known for his diary documenting his fight against cancer.
WBryan Waller Procter was an English poet who served as a Commissioner in Lunacy.
WArthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The books remain popular and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.
WPeter Robinson is an English-Canadian crime writer. He is best known for his crime novels set in Yorkshire featuring Inspector Alan Banks. He has also published a number of other novels and short stories as well as some poems and two articles on writing.
WJustina Robson is a science fiction author from Leeds, England.
WWilliam Matthew Scott, pen name Will Scott, was a British author of stories and books for adults and children, published from 1920 to 1965. Towards the end of his life he was best known for The Cherrys series, written for children and published between 1952 and 1965. However, in earlier years he was known for his detective novels, his stage plays which were made into films, notably The Limping Man in 1931 and 1936, and for the 2,000 short stories that he contributed to magazines and newspapers; believed to be a record for the United Kingdom during his lifetime. As of 2011, his books are out of print.
WCharles David George "Charlie" Stross is a British writer of science fiction and fantasy. Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. Between 1994 and 2004, he was also an active writer for the magazine Computer Shopper and was responsible for the monthly Linux column. He stopped writing for the magazine to devote more time to novels. However, he continues to publish freelance articles on the Internet.
WJohn Philip "Jake" Thackray was an English singer-songwriter, poet and journalist. Best known in the late 1960s and early 1970s for his topical comedy songs performed on British television, his work ranged from satirical to bawdy to sentimental to pastoral, with a strong emphasis on storytelling, making him difficult to categorise.
WPaul Westmoreland, known professionally as Wash Westmoreland and previously known as Wash West, is a British director who has worked in television, documentaries, and independent films. He frequently collaborated with his husband, writer-director Richard Glatzer. Together, they wrote and directed the 2014 film Still Alice, based on Lisa Genova's NYT best-selling book and starred Julianne Moore, Kristen Stewart, and Alec Baldwin. The film won many awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actress for Julianne Moore and Humanitas Prize for feature film for the duo. Their 2006 coming-of-age feature film, Quinceañera, won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.