Joanne Harris is a very successful and respected writer. In 2004 she was one of the judges of the Whitbread Prize (categories first novel and overall winner) and in 2005 a judge of the Orange Prize.
Joanne’s books are now published in over 40 countries and have won a number of British and International awards: Chocolat won the Whitaker Gold Award, the Creative Freedom Award and was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize, Gentlemen and Players was short-listed for an Edgar in the USA, the Prix du Polar in France and the Listen-up Audio Award for the audio book, and Runemarks won the Bulletin Blue Book Award and the Book Sense Children’s Pick List.
Blackberry Wine won the French and International Perigueux Awards for Fiction. Joanne also received a Lifetime Award from Vigerano, Italy.
Joanne was born in Barnsley of a French mother and an English father. After going to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge to study modern/mediaeval languages, she taught modern languages in Leeds for 15 years before giving up to write full time in 2000.
She is the author of 10 published novels: The Evil Seed; Sleep Pale Sister; Chocolat (made into an Oscar-nominated film); Blackberry Wine; Five Quarters of the Orange; Coastliners; Holy Fools; Gentlemen and Players; The Lollipop Shoes; Runemarks, and Jigs and Reels - a collection of short stories, as well as two cookbooks, The French Kitchen and The French Market, co-written with cookery writer Fran Warde.
She has contributed to In Bed With, an unashamedly erotic book of short stories by strong woman writers, and she wrote a short story for each of the anthologies Mums, a celebration of Motherhood, and Dads, a celebration of Fatherhood. Her newest book is Blue Eyed Boy, which is due for publication.
www.joanne-harris.co.uk

Iqbal Khan trained at the Japanese Fellowship for Young Directors, took a directing course at the National Studio, and trained at the Arts Council Directing Bursary. He has an MA (Distinction) in Theatre Directing from Middlesex University and a post-graduate acting diploma from the Academy Drama School.
His extensive acting credits include Othello, Prospero, King Berenger and Vanya at the Edinburgh Fringe.
He is a board member for Theatre Writing Partnership and his development work includes workshops for the Education Department at the National Theatre and Pegasus Opera, and new writing projects with Box Clever and the Birmingham Rep. He has also been staff and tour director for the Royal National Theatre.
Iqbal’s directing includes: Rafta Rafta; Dirty Kissing; The Tiger at the Gates; Boxed Tempest; Too Close to Home (nominated Men’s Awards 2005); Time for the Good Looking Boy; Boxed Macbeth; The Solitude of Ofuko; Footloose (resident director national tour); Dancing Within Walls; Sennan Konjaku Mukashi Katari Sanmon Opera; Madama Butterfly (awarded the Minack Trophy); The Illustrious Corpse; Into the Woods; Beautiful Thing; Othello; Suzannah; In the Blink of an Eye; The Maids (Time Out Critics’ Choice); The Importance of Being Earnest; The Creation of the World and Other Business; Uncle Vanya; The Homecoming; Hamlet; Exit the King, and Murder in the Cathedral.
Since 2008 he has been an associate director on Simply Cinderella (at the Curve), directed Oleanna (Bolton Octagon), Richard III (Royal Welsh College), and East is East at the Birmingham Rep.

Iqbal Khan - see above.
Kenneth Branagh trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His theatre credits include Another Country; Henry V; Golden Girls; Hamlet; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Romeo and Juliet (also directed); Public Enemy; As You Like It; Hamlet; Much Ado About Nothing; Look Back in Anger; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; King Lear (also directed); Coriolanus; Hamlet; Richard III; Edmond, and Ivanov.
Kenneth’s television credits include The Billy Plays; The Boy In The Bush; Fortunes of War; Shadow of a Gunman; Conspiracy; Shackleton; Warm Springs, and Wallander.
Writing credits: Plays - Tell Me Honesty and Public Enemy; his autobiography Beginning; Screen adaptations - Shakespeare’s Henry V; Much Ado About Nothing; Hamlet; Love’s Labour’s Lost; As You Like It, and In The Bleak Midwinter.
Plays directed include John Sessions’ The Life of Napoleon and Napoleon; The American Story; Twelfth Night; The Play What I Wrote, and Ducktastic.
Film credits include Henry V; Dead Again; Peter’s Friends; Much Ado About Nothing; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; In The Bleak Midwinter; Othello; Hamlet; The Gingerbread Man; Theory of Flight; Celebrity; Wild Wild West; El Dorado; Love’s Labour’s Lost; How To Kill Your Neighbour’s Dog; Rabbit Proof Fence; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; As You Like It; The Magic Flute, and Sleuth.

2007 judge Nell Leyshon

Fay Weldon CBE is one of Britain’s most influential, best-read and versatile writers.
As well as over 20 novels and four collections of short stories, she writes for stage, screen, television and radio. Her essays and reviews appear regularly in leading newspapers and journals. Her work is translated throughout the world. Her novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil became a major Hollywood film starring Meryl Streep and Rosanne Barr; Heart of the Country won the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, and both the novel and the TV version of The Cloning of Joanna May won worldwide approval.
She has staged plays in London’s West End and in New York, and her recent adaptation of Madame Bovary has been played in Germany and in Stockholm.
She has written extensively for television, wrote the pilot episode for the notable TV series Upstairs Downstairs for ITV, and a favourite adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for the BBC. Channel 4 screened her four part series Big Women, the dramatized story of the feminist movement in Britain in the seventies and eighties. One of her novels, The Bulgari Connection, was translated into Greek and is soon to be published by Livanis. She is currently working on an opera libretto for the French classic Le Diable au Corps, and on a film version of her novel Worst Fears. She was made a CBE for services to literature, and is now head of creative writing at Brunel University. www.contemporarywriters.com
Nell Leyshon’s first play The Farm, was runner-up for the Meyer Whitworth Award in 2003. Comfort Me with Apples won the 2005 Charles Wintour Award for most promising playwright in the Evening Standard Awards, and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. In 2007 her adaptation of Don’t Look Now was produced at Sheffield and the Lyric Hammersmith. Her next play, Glass Eels, was produced at Hampstead Theatre in June 2007, and one month later, the one act play, Winter, appeared in a double bill in Newfoundland, Canada, followed by a UK tour.
Nell’s first radio play, the co-written Milk, won the Richard Imison Award, and she writes regularly for Radio 3 and 4. Nell’s first novel, Black Dirt, is published by Picador, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel Devotion was published in 2008, also by Picador. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Nell Leyshon was born in Glastonbury and brought up in Somerset. She now lives with her family in Dorset. www.nellleyshon.co.uk

2006 judge Nina Bawden CBE

Fay Weldon - as above
Nina Bawden CBE is one of Britain’s most distinguished and best loved novelists, both for adults and children. She has published over 40 novels and an autobiography In My Own Time. She was short-listed for the Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and her novel Family Money was filmed by Channel 4, starring Claire Bloom and June Whitfield. In 2004 she received the ST Dupont Golden PEN Award for a lifetime’s contribution to literature.
In 2002 she and her husband Austen Kark were on the train to Cambridge when it was de-railed at Potters Bar. He was killed instantly and she was gravely injured. Seven people were killed and 76 badly hurt. She found herself, in her seventies, the spokesperson of the crash, and has been angered by a sense of injustice and the behaviour of the privatised world. Only in May 2006 did she finally win £1 million compensation.
Nina Bawden lives in London.

2005 Judge Fay Weldon:
Picture by Jonathan Dockav-Drysdale

Fay Weldon - as above
Nell Dunn is one of Britain’s most well-known and successful women writers. Her plays have been produced on television, film, and in the theatre in the West End, New York, and around the world. Highlights include Up the Junction (1965) directed by Ken Loach, Poor Cow (1967) also directed by Ken Loach, and Steaming (1981), which received the Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier Awards for 1981, ran for two years in the West End, and then went around the world for 10 years. The very successful 1984 film version was directed by Joseph Losey. Other notable works include Sisters (1984) and Cancer Tales (May 2005), both performed at The Wolsey Theatre.

Howard Panter co-founded the Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) in 1992 with Rosemary Squire. It is currently the second biggest theatre group in the West End and, separately, the second biggest in the UK regions, with a total of 23 venues. ATG is also one of the country’s foremost theatre producers and has been behind some of the most successful and innovative productions in Britain and internationally.

ATG’s impressive portfolio of West End theatres include high profile and historic buildings such as the Albery; Comedy; Donmar Warehouse; Duke of York’s; Fortune; New Ambassadors; Phoenix; Piccadilly; Playhouse (co-ownership and management of); Wyndhams and the new Trafalgar Studios at the Whitehall Theatre. ATG’s regional theatres include The Ambassadors Woking, encompassing the New Victoria and Rhoda McGaw Theatres and a six-screen cinema complex; the Theatre Royal, Brighton; the Victoria Concert Hall, Stoke-on-Trent; the Regent Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent; Milton Keynes Theatre; the Churchill Theatre in Bromley; Richmond Theatre; The King’s Theatre in Glasgow and, most recently, the New Wimbledon Theatre, London and the New Wimbledon Studio, London.

ATG also has a series of creative alliances, based in theatre, but with the potential to form a bridge between media. These unique initiatives include a co-production company with Trademark Films, makers of Shakespeare in Love, and a rights packaging and production enabling joint venture company ScreenStage with ITV plc, which has made five TV films to date. In addition, ATG has also formed a co-producing and commissioning alliance with the acclaimed Young Vic Theatre Company, and has a wholly owned subsidiary company Sonia Friedman Productions, led by producer Sonia Friedman, whose co-productions include Endgame with Michael Gambon and Lee Evans; See You Next Tuesday with Ardal O’Hanlon and Nigel Havers; Sexual Perversity in Chicago with Matthew Perry and Minnie Driver; Franco Zefferelli’s Absolutely! (perhaps) with Joan Plowright; Ragtime; Macbeth with Sean Bean; Up For Grabs with Madonna and On An Average Day with Woody Harrelson and Kyle McLachlan, all in London.

http://www.theambassadors.com/atg

Hilary Mantel

Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, on 6 July, 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah, and she was film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991.

Her novels include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street(1988), set in Jeddah; Fludd (1989), set in a mill village in the north of England and winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), an epic account of the events of the French revolution that won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; A Change of Climate (1994), the story of a missionary couple whose lives are torn apart by the loss of their child; and An Experiment in Love (1995), about the events in the lives of three school friends from the north of England who arrive at London University in 1970, winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize.

Her recent novel The Giant, O’Brien (1998) tells the story of Charles O’Brien who leaves his home in Ireland to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction in London. Her latest books are Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir 2003), an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction told in four parts, taking the reader from early childhood through to the discoveries in adulthood that led her to writing, and Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003). Hilary Mantel is currently working on a new novel entitled Beyond Black.

Every Day is Mother’s Day Chatto & Windus, 1985
Vacant Possession Chatto & Windus, 1986
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Viking, 1988
Fludd Viking, 1989
A Place of Greater Safety Viking, 1992
A Change of Climate Viking, 1994
An Experiment in Love Viking, 1995
The Giant, O’Brien Fourth Estate, 1998
On Modern British Fiction (contributor) Oxford University Press, 2002
Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir Fourth Estate, 2003
Learning to Talk: Short Stories Fourth Estate, 2003

1987 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize
1990 Southern Arts Literature Prize Fludd
1990 The Cheltenham Prize Fludd
1990 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize Fludd
1992 Sunday Express Book of the Year A Place of Greater Safety
1996 Hawthornden Prize An Experiment in Love
http://www.contemporarywriters.com