59 Writers from Manchester

Rachel Abbott is a British author of psychological thrillers. A self-publisher, her first seven novels have combined to sell over three million copies, and have all been bestsellers on Amazon's Kindle store. In 2015, she was named the 14th bestselling author over the last five years on Amazon's Kindle in the UK.

Caroline Mary Aherne was an English comedian, writer and actress, best known for performing as the acerbic chat show host Mrs Merton, in various roles in The Fast Show, and as Denise in The Royle Family, a series which she co-wrote. She won BAFTA awards for her work on The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family.

William Harrison Ainsworth was an English historical novelist born at King Street in Manchester. He trained as a lawyer, but the legal profession held no attraction for him. While completing his legal studies in London he met the publisher John Ebers, at that time manager of the King's Theatre, Haymarket. Ebers introduced Ainsworth to literary and dramatic circles, and to his daughter, who became Ainsworth's wife.

George Arthurs was an English songwriter, playwright, composer, author and screenwriter who contributed lyrics to several successful musical comedies such as The Belle of Mayfair (1906), Havana (1908) and Yes, Uncle! (1917), before writing dialogue for such films as The Yellow Mask (1931).

John R. Ashton MBE (1917–2008) was an English writer, lecturer, local historian and educationist active in Sweden. He was the former chairman of the British Factory. He resided in Gothenburg, Sweden, with his Swedish wife Torborg.

Lawrence Atkinson (1873–1931) was an English artist, musician and poet.

William Edward Armytage Axon was an English librarian, antiquary and journalist for the Manchester Guardian. He contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography under his initials W. E. A. A. He was also a notable vegetarianism activist.

Alice Ann Bailey was a writer of more than twenty-four books on theosophical subjects, and was one of the first writers to use the term New Age. Bailey was born as Alice La Trobe-Bateman, in Manchester, England. She moved to the United States in 1907, where she spent most of her life as a writer and teacher.

Isabella Banks, also known as Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks, was an English novelist and poet. Born in Manchester, England, Banks is most widely remembered today for her book The Manchester Man, published in 1876.

Les Barker is an English poet, who is famous for his comedic poetry and parodies of popular songs, but he has also produced some very serious thought-provoking written works.

Alfred Barratt was an English barrister and philosopher. He trained in law the University of Oxford, and published his first book, Physical Ethics, in 1869 while studying there. He died an early death in 1881 from overwork as a barrister, secretary to the Oxford University Commission, and philosopher. His second book, Physical Metempiric, was published posthumously in 1883.

Helen Bosanquet was an English social theorist and social reformer. Helen was the wife of English philosopher Bernard Bosanquet.

Harvey Broadbent, AM is an Australian writer, lecturer, broadcaster, former award-winning full-time television and radio documentary maker and cruise ship cultural history lecturer. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia on 26 January 2016 for significant service to the literary arts as an author and publisher, to the television industry as a producer, and to tertiary education. He is nowadays best known in Australia as a Gallipoli Campaign historian and specialist in Turkish, Anatolian, and Eastern Mediterranean history and culture.

John Anthony Burgess Wilson,, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer.

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).

John Byrom or John Byrom of Kersal or John Byrom of Manchester FRS was an English poet, the inventor of a revolutionary system of shorthand and later a significant landowner. He is most remembered as the writer of the lyrics of Anglican hymn Christians awake! Salute the happy morn, which was supposedly a Christmas gift for his daughter.

Henry James Byron was a prolific English dramatist, as well as an editor, journalist, director, theatre manager, novelist and actor.

Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell was a British-born American novelist and prolific author of popular fiction, also known by the pen names Marcus Holland and Max Reiner, and by her married name of J. Miriam Reback.

Alan Graham Carr is an English comedian and television personality.

Nicholas Cohen is a British journalist, author and political commentator. He is a columnist for The Observer, a blogger for The Spectator and a writer for Standpoint magazine. Born in Stockport and raised in Manchester, Cohen studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford before entering journalism.

Vybarr Cregan-Reid is a British author, academic and broadcaster. He works at the University of Kent where he is a Professor of English & Environmental Humanities. He is the author of Footnotes: How Running Makes us Human (2016), and Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us (2018). Before that, he published Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, Narrative & the Historical Sublime in Victorian Culture (2013). He has appeared on Sky and ITV, and made programmes for the BBC.

Thomas Penson De Quincey was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West.

William Arthur Dunkerley was an English journalist, novelist and poet. He was born in Manchester, spent a short time after his marriage in the US before moving to Ealing, West London, where he served as deacon and teacher at the Ealing Congregational Church from the 1880s. In 1922 he moved to Worthing in Sussex, where he became the town's mayor.

Jessie Fothergill was an English novelist. Her novel The First Violin sold particularly well.

Montague Marsden Glass was a British-American Jewish lawyer and writer of short stories, plays and film scripts. His greatest success came with the creation of his fictional duo Abe Potash and Morris ("Mawrus") Perlmutter, who appeared in three books, a play, and several films.

Richard James Horatio Gottheil was an English American Semitic scholar, Zionist, and founding father of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.

Robert Grant is an English comedy writer, television producer and co-creator of Red Dwarf. Since Red Dwarf, Grant has written two television series, The Strangerers and Dark Ages, and four solo novels, his most recent being Fat. During his career Grant has been involved in two distinct writing partnerships: the first with Doug Naylor, and the second and most recent with Andrew Marshall.

Sydney Grundy was an English dramatist. Most of his works were adaptations of European plays, and many became successful enough to tour throughout the English-speaking world. He is, however, perhaps best remembered today as the librettist of several comic operas, notably Haddon Hall.

Sophie Hannah is a British poet and novelist. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and between 1999 and 2001 a junior research fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge.

Ernest John ("E.J.") Harrison was an English journalist, author and judoka. Harrison was born in Manchester, England, on 22 August 1873. He wrote many books about the practice of judo. He died in London, on 23 April 1961.

Lawrence Warrington Haward was a noted art collector and writer who was the second Curator of the Manchester City Art Gallery from 1914 to 1945.

Rodney Howard Hilton was an English Marxist historian of the late medieval period and the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Paul Bede Johnson is an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter, and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he is now a conservative popular historian.

Nicholas Lander is a consultant to and writer on the restaurant industry.

Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he shifted to a Marxist emphasis on class conflict and the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.

Stephen Leather is a British thriller author whose works are published by Hodder & Stoughton. He has written for television shows such as London's Burning, The Knock, and the BBC's Murder in Mind series. He is one of the top selling Amazon Kindle authors, the second bestselling UK author worldwide on Kindle in 2011.

Caroline Alice Lejeune was a British writer, best known for serving as the film critic for The Observer from 1928 to 1960. She was among the earliest newspaper film critics and is thought to have been the first British woman in the profession, with her first regular film column predating Iris Barry's earliest contribution to The Spectator of this kind by about a year.

Martin Lings, also known as Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn, was an English writer, scholar, and philosopher. A student of the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon and an authority on the work of William Shakespeare, he is best known as the author of Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, first published in 1983 and still in print.

Kenan Malik is an Indian-born British writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science. As an academic author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race (1996), Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) and Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate (2008).

Faranak Margolese is an American-Israeli writer, best known as the author of Off the Derech, a book about contemporary assimilation in the Orthodox Jewish world.

Ian McDonald is a British science fiction novelist, living in Belfast. His themes include nanotechnology, postcyberpunk settings, and the impact of rapid social and technological change on non-Western societies.

Trevor Miller is an English screenwriter, author and playwright who the Record Mirror joked "is hailed by some as the voice of a generation". The London Evening Standard called his debut novel Trip City "an On the Road for the post warehouse party generation." He has since moved to Los Angeles, where he writes film screenplays.

Allan Noble Monkhouse was an English playwright, critic, essayist and novelist.

Alfred Ollivant was an academic who went on to become Bishop of Llandaff.

George Ormerod FRS was an English antiquary and historian. Among his writings was a major county history of Cheshire, in North West England.

Timothy Harold Parks is a British novelist, translator, author and professor of literature.

Andy Remic is a British author of thrillers, science fiction and military science fiction. He is also an indie filmmaker.

Graham Macdonald Robb FRSL is a British author and critic specialising in French literature.

John Rodker was an English writer, modernist poet, and publisher of modernist writers.

Jack Morris Rosenthal was an English playwright who wrote 129 early episodes of the ITV soap opera Coronation Street and over 150 screenplays, including original TV plays, feature films, and adaptations. A street in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester is named after him, appropriately next to a centre of contemporary art, theatre and film that opened in 2015, HOME.

Lemn Sissay is an English author and broadcaster. Sissay was the official poet of the 2012 London Olympics, has been chancellor of the University of Manchester since 2015, and joined the Foundling Museum's board of trustees two years later, having previously been appointed one of the museum's fellows. He was awarded the 2019 PEN Pinter Prize. He has written a number of books and plays.

Natan Slifkin also Nosson Slifkin, popularly known as the "Zoo Rabbi", is a British-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi and director of the Biblical Museum of Natural History in Beit Shemesh, Israel. He is best known for his interest in zoology, science and for his books on these topics, which are controversial to a small number of Haredi Jews.

Brian Sterling-Vete is an English author, Guinness World Record Holder, motivational speaker, TV broadcaster, Director, Stage, Film and Television actor, stunt performer, martial arts expert, fitness expert and entrepreneur.

Sam Stone is a British author of gothic, horror, fantasy, science fiction and more recently a playwright for film and stage. She is the commissioning editor of Telos Publishing imprint Telos Moonrise. Stone's debut novel Gabriele Caccini won the silver award for best horror novel 2007 with ForeWord in the USA. She was shortlisted for the August Derleth Award for Best Novel in the British Fantasy Awards for her second novel, Futile Flame. This book was also a finalist in ForeWord's Book of the Year Awards in 2009 and the third book in the series, Demon Dance, was also a finalist for the 2010 Foreword magazine Awards and won the August Derleth Award for Best Novel in the British Fantasy Awards 2011. This made her the first female writer to win the Award since Tanith Lee did so in 1980. However, after the awards were announced, there was controversy over the voting and so Stone publicly returned the Award, not wishing to be associated with something which might have been awarded erroneously. The BFS then declared that the voting was valid, but then in a later statement announced that the Best Novel would be declared a 'No Award' for that year. Stone was not consulted in this decision. She also won the Best Short Story Award in the British Fantasy Awards in the same year. In August 2012 Telos Publishing issued a press release announcing the forthcoming audio of Stone's horror collection – Zombies In New York. Telos also published her Steampunk/Horror Novella Zombies at Tiffany's.

John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939) was an English Uranian poet, memoirist, novelist and merchant trader. Born John James Young in the slums of Manchester, Stuart-Young was poorly educated and treated badly by those around him. Beaten by his labourer father, his mother was forced to take in washing. All of his siblings died young of tuberculosis. He left school at 13, working for little reward as an office boy and clerk. After having been caught stealing money from a gas-mantle works, apparently to help establish himself as something of a literary gentleman, Stuart-Young was arrested and spent six months in prison. He was only 18.

Robert Thyer (1709–1781) was an 18th-century British writer and literary editor, best known as Chetham's Librarian.

James Wannerton; is an English IT professional, artist and writer. He experiences sound to taste synesthesia, including lexical-gustatory synesthesia; i.e. he can "taste" sounds, including words or word sounds.

Simon Weinstein, known by his Hebrew name Simcha Weinstein, is an English author and a rabbi. In 2006, his first book Up Up and Oy Vey: How Jewish History, Culture and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero was published. In 2008, his second book Shtick Shift: Jewish Humor in the 21st Century was published.

Jeanette Winterson is an English writer, who became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values. Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity, with later novels also exploring the relationship between humans and technology. She is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing.