ORIGINAL TALENT - Key Persons
Adele Parks worked in advertising until she published her first novel, Playing Away, in 2000; it was the debut bestseller of that year and the Evening Standard named her one of the twenty faces to watch.
She has gone on to publish eighteen novels, all which have been top ten bestsellers. Since 2006 she has been an official spokeswoman for World Book Day and she's also a trustee of Guildford Book Festival.
Adele spent much of her adult life in Italy, Botswana and London before settling in Guildford in 2005 where she now lives with her husband and son.
Job Titles:
- Columnist and Associate Editor
Ben Macintyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times. He has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. He is the author of nine previous books including Agent Zigzag, shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Galaxy British Book Award for Biography of the Year 2008, and the no. 1 bestsellers A Spy Among Friends, Operation Mincemeat and Double Cross.
His most recent book is SAS: Rogue Heroes, the first authorized wartime history of the SAS and a Sunday Times bestseller.
Bryan Ferry is a singer, songwriter and co-founder of the group Roxy Music, with whom he wrote and recorded eight acclaimed albums. He has released numerous solo albums and is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and influential recording artists of all time. In 2011 Ferry was awarded a CBE and in 2012 received the French national honour of l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2014 he was made an Honorary Doctor of Music by Newcastle University. Roxy Music were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
Christopher Wilson has written several novels, including - Gallimauf's Gospel, Baa, Blueglass, Mischief, Fou, The Wurd, The Ballad of Lee Cotton, and Nookie. His work has been translated into several languages, adapted for the stage, and twice shortlisted for the Whitbread Fiction Prize. He has also been long-listed for the HWA Crown Awards.
He trained as a psychologist, wrote a Ph.D. on the psychology of humour at The London School of Economics, worked widely as a researcher, lectured for ten years at Goldsmiths' College, London University, and has taught creative writing in prisons, at university and for The Arvon Foundation. He sometimes works as a consultant semiotician. He lives in North London with his wife, the actress Iona Kennedy, and two children.
Job Titles:
- Author
- Business Specialist
Claire Evans is an established business specialist in the UK television industry. After finishing her law degree, she qualified as an accountant, but realising her mistake quickly ran away to work at the National Theatre before finally landing a job at the BBC. Once there, she rose through the ranks to head up operations and business affairs across the TV commissioning teams, leading many deals including the acquisition of The Apprentice format and securing Graham Norton at the BBC. In drama, she led the BBC's commercial relationships with the independent production sector and a wide range of international co-producers and distributors.
She left the BBC in 2013 to pursue her writing career. Since then she has advised a number of drama and film production companies, most recently working on The Honourable Woman (BBC2) and Doctor Foster (BBC1). She is also now the Chief Operating Officer at Two Brothers Pictures Ltd, the company set up by Harry and Jack Williams, the creators of The Missing (BBC1).
David Farr is a playwright, screenwriter, stage director and Film/TV director whose plays have been performed all over the world. He has increasingly moved into film and television, working on the long-running BBC show Spooks and completing his first feature film, Hanna, for Focus Features in 2009. His directorial debut,The Ones Below, with Cuba Pictures premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 and was released in UK cinemas in March 2016.
David's adaptation of John le Carré's novel The Night Manager, produced by The Ink Factory, starring Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston and directed by Susanne Bier, aired on BBC1 in 2016. A total of 9.9 million people tuned in to watch the series finale and the show earned multiple awards and nominations.
David's episode of the Philip K. Dick series Electric Dreams, entitled Impossible Planet, aired on Channel 4 in 2017 and his BBC1 and Netflix epic miniseries Troy: Fall of a City aired in February 2018. David adapted his feature film Hanna into a television series for Amazon Prime. Series 2 of Hanna was released to great praise in 2020, with David writing and directing. Series 3 has been greenlit and is currently shooting.
David's theatre career began when he became Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre, London, in 1995. His work at The Gate earned him a reputation as one of the most exciting new talents in British theatre, a reputation that he built on when he left The Gate to become Artistic Director of Bristol Old Vic in 2002 and London's Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 2005.
In 2009, David left The Lyric to become Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His productions, The Winter's Tale, King Lear and The Homecoming all opened to critical acclaim.
David Mitchell is widely renowned as one of the greatest British novelists of his generation, garnering comparisons to Tolstoy, Twain, DeLillo and Pynchon, among others.
He has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the South Bank Show Literature Prize, and the Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year Prize. He has also been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and the Costa Book Award. He has also written the libretto for the opera Wake, which debuted at the Nationale Reisopera in 2010 to great acclaim.
Born in 1969, David grew up in Worcestershire and, after several years teaching in Japan, now lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.
His novel Cloud Atlas has been adapted into a film by Tom Twyker, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. David's highly anticipated eighth novel Utopia Avenue published in 2020.
Diana Henry is a bestselling writer and journalist. She is the author of twelve books and has won many plaudits for her work, including awards from the Andre Simon Memorial Fund, the James Beard Foundation, Fortnum & Mason and the Guild of Food Writers.
Diana was born and brought up in Northern Ireland. She read English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford and did postgraduate studies in journalism at City University, London. She joined the BBC as a Trainee Assistant Producer after City University and had a successful career as a tv producer, making human interest and arts programmes. She started to write in 1998, after the birth of her first child.
Her first book, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, was published in 2002 to great critical acclaim. Her other books include Cook Simple, The Gastropub Cookbook, Roast Figs Sugar Snow, Food from Plenty, Salt, Sugar, Smoke, A Change of Appetite, A Bird in the Hand, Simple, How to Eat a Peach and From the Oven to the Table. She has had a weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph for 18 years and writes for various magazines in the UK, the United States and Ireland.
Diana lives in London with her children and, when she's not in the kitchen or writing, she can most often be found with her nose in a book, usually American or Irish literature. She travels as much as possible and is currently obsessed with Russia.
Donald McRae was born near Johannesburg in South Africa in 1961 and has been based in London since 1984.
He is the award-winning author of eight non-fiction books which have featured legendary trial lawyers, heart surgeons and sporting icons. He is the two-time winner of the UK's prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year - an award won in the past by Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and Laura Hillenbrand's Sea Biscuit. As a journalist he has won the UK's Sports Feature Writer of The Year - and was runner up in the 2008 UK Sports Writer of the Year - for his work in The Guardian. He was voted Sports Interviewer of the Year for three years running (2010-2012) at the Sports Journalism Association Awards.
Donald lived under apartheid for the first twenty-three years of his life. The impact of that experience has shaped much of his non-fiction writing. At the age of twenty-one he took up a full-time post as a teacher of English literature in Soweto. He worked in the black township for eighteen months until, in August 1984, he was forced to leave the country. His memoir Under Our Skin is based on these experiences.
Fiona Neill is an author and journalist who has written five Sunday Times best sellers. Her novels have been translated into twenty-six languages and have sold over a million copies worldwide. Her new novel Beneath the Surface is out now in hardback from Penguin. Her last novel The Betrayals, spent six weeks in the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller list and was a Richard and Judy Book Club selection.
Fiona grew up on a farm in an isolated village in North Norfolk, where she still spends as much time as possible. She graduated with a first class degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies at The University of Bristol in 1989 and went on to do an MA in politics at the Institute of Latin American Studies in London.
After university she went to live in Central America for a year and ended up staying for six. The first two years she worked for an international refugee organisation travelling in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua writing reports on refugees who had fled their homes because of civil war. From 1993 she worked for three years as the correspondent for the news agency Reuters based in Guatemala before returning to the United Kingdom to become features editor at Marie Claire magazine. She then joined The Times Magazine as assistant editor for three years before returning to life as a freelance feature writer.
The Good Girl was optioned for development by Duchess Productions and The Betrayals by Snowed-In Production. Fiona's first novel The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy, based on her fictional column for The Times, was an international bestseller that was extracted in American Vogue.
Fiona Neill lives in London with her husband and three children. She is currently working on her seventh novel.
Gary Younge is based in London and writes for The Guardian and The Nation. His coverage of the Obama campaign was awarded the James Cameron award for the combined moral vision and professional integrity. He is the author of The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream (Haymarket), Who Are We - And Should it Matter in the 21st Century (Nation Books), Stranger in a Strange Land (New Press), and No Place Like Home (Mississippi). His most recent book, Another Day in the Death of America, was longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Books in 2017.
Gary Younge is an excellent Journalist - a critical writer at a critical time. Andrea Levy
Job Titles:
- CEO
- Chairman, CEO the
- in 1993 As an Assistant
Jonny Geller joined Curtis Brown in 1993 as an assistant after a short career as an actor. He became a literary agent in 1995 after discovering a novel on the unsolicited pile which went on to sell rights around the world. After taking part in a Management Buyout in 2001, he became CEO of the Agency in 2012 and is now CEO of The Curtis Brown Group, the parent company of Curtis Brown agency, C&W, Ed Victor Ltd, Curtis Brown Creative (CBC), Tavistock Wood, Markham Froggatt and Irwin, Cuba Productions and Chair of CBC.
Job Titles:
- Producer RSC / Writer William Shakespeare
Job Titles:
- Producer Roopesh Parekh / Director Mahalia Belo
American premiere of David's adaptation of Franz Kafka's novella about a man who wakes up to find that he has been turned into a bug
Job Titles:
- Producer Roopesh Parekh / Director Mahalia Belo
Job Titles:
- Producer Roopesh Parekh / Director Mahalia Belo
Job Titles:
- Producer RSC / Writer William Shakespeare
- Writer