George Eliot was born Mary Anne (known as Marian) Evans in 1819, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire. She was brought up as an Evangelist, and received a classical education at local boarding schools. After the death of her mother in 1836, she moved to Coventry with her father and became acquainted with free-thinkers Charles and Cara Bray, which led to her translating Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846). After her father’s death in 1849, she moved to London, where she met George Henry Lewes, who was separated from, but crucially unable to divorce, his wife. Moving to Germany with him in 1854, she lived as his common-law wife for twenty-four years. Under his encouragement she began writing fiction under her nom de plume: the successful serial Scenes of Clerical Life (1858); the best-selling Adam Bede (1859); followed by a number of poems and further highly praised works such as The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–2) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Lewes’s death in 1878 saw the effective end of her writing career. A few short months into her marriage to a man twenty years her junior, she died in December 1880.

Susan Elkin is an author and journalist, specialising in education and the performing arts. She was Education and Training Editor at The Stage for many years, freelances for newspapers and magazines and has written over thirty books.

Sophie Ellerby is a playwright and actor. She was awarded a place on HighTide's First Commission scheme in 2016 where she wrote her debut play Lit. Other work includes: Three (Arcola Theatre, London, 2017) and Function (Criterion Theatre, 2018).

Samantha Ellis grew up in the Iraqi Jewish community in London. She writes plays, TV, film and non-fiction books.

Her plays include: How to Date a Feminist (Arcola Theatre, and productions all over the world); Cling to me Like Ivy (Birmingham Rep); Operation Magic Carpet (Polka) and I'm Still Burning (part of Jermyn Street Theatre's 15 Heroines). She has written plays for East 15 and LAMDA, as well as short plays for Menagerie Theatre, Agent 160 and The Miniaturists, and radio plays for the BBC.

She has developed screen projects with Tall Story Pictures and Working Title, and worked on both Paddington films.

She is also the author of non-fiction books How to be a Heroine and Take Courage.

(Author photo by Jules Rogers)

Born in Birmingham in 1951, and educated there at King Edward’s School and then at Bristol University, Kevin Elyot was an actor before becoming a writer.

He won the Samuel Beckett Award for his first play, Coming Clean (1982), staged by the Bush Theatre, London. Subsequent stage work includes a version of Ostrovsky’s Artists and Admirers (RSC, 1992); My Night with Reg (Royal Court Theatre, 1994), which was hailed as ‘a play of genius’ by the Daily Mail, won the Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Comedy and ran for almost a year in the West End; The Day I Stood Still (National Theatre, 1998); Mouth to Mouth (Royal Court, 2001), which also transferred to the West End; and Forty Winks (Royal Court, 2004).

Kevin’s screenplays include Killing Time (BBC, 1990), which won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best TV Play or Film; an adaptation of The Moonstone (BBC, 1996); the film version of My Night with Reg (BBC, 1997); No Night is Too Long (2002), adapted from the novel by Barbara Vine (the pseudonym of Ruth Rendell) for BBC Films/Alliance. He adapted six of Agatha Christie’s Marple novels as well as three of her Poirot novels for television, including the series’ final episode Curtain. Other screenplays include Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (BBC, 2005), adapted from the novel by Patrick Hamilton; Riot at the Rite (BBC, 2005); Clapham Junction (2007), a film for Darlow Smithson and Channel 4, starring Rupert Graves, Paul Nicholls and Luke Treadaway; and Christopher and His Kind (Mammoth Screen/BBC, 2011), based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel, starring Matt Smith, Lindsay Duncan, Imogen Poots and Toby Jones.

Kevin died in June 2014, shortly before the Donmar Warehouse revival of My Night with Reg.

Louis Emmitt-Stern is a writer and director from Gibraltar based in London. His plays include: I Fucked You in My Spaceship (VAULT Festival & Soho Theatre, London, 2023); and Slippery (winner of the Tony Craze Award 2021).

Kenny Emson (aka Kenneth Emson) is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays include Rust (Bush Theatre, London, 2019); Plastic (Old Red Lion, London, 2018); This Must Be the Place, with Brad Birch (Latitude Festival, 2016 & VAULT Festival, London, 2017); Rural (White Bear); Whispering Happiness (Tristan Bates); Our Nobby (Eastern Angles, touring); The Peterborough Effect (Eastern Angles, touring); England Street (Oxford Playhouse); and Terrorism (Bush Theatre).

He also writes for TV and film and was nominated for a Bafta Craft Award in 2016 for his work on The Last Hours of Laura K.

Annie Ernaux is a French writer who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Her works include the 2008 historical memoir Les Années (The Years), which won the Marguerite Duras Prize and the 2016 Strega European Prize. Translated by Alison L. Strayer, The Years was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019, and won the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

John Esmonde (1937–2008) was a writer best known for his work with Bob Larbey. Esmonde and Larbey were the British television comedy scriptwriting partnership behind popular sitcoms during the 1970s and the 1980s such as Please Sir!, The Good Life, Get Some In!, Ever Decreasing Circles, and Brush Strokes.