Verified Author Biographies

English playwright and poet, born and died in Stratford-upon-Avon. Wrote Macbeth c.1606 for the court of King James I - flattering the new Stuart monarch by tracing Banquo's line and incorporating James's own published work on witchcraft (Daemonologie, 1597).

English novelist, daughter of philosopher William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Conceived Frankenstein at age 18 during the famous 1816 Villa Diodati creative competition with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818.

English novelist whose own childhood poverty (his father was imprisoned for debt) shaped his lifelong commitment to social reform. The most popular novelist of the Victorian era; mastered the serial form for All the Year Round and Household Words.

English novelist; eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived to adulthood. Published Jane Eyre (1847) under the male pseudonym Currer Bell.

English novelist and poet; published as Ellis Bell. Died of tuberculosis aged 30, the year after Wuthering Heights appeared.

English novelist; published as Acton Bell. The youngest Brontë; died of tuberculosis aged 29.

Pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. Anglo-Indian-born British novelist, essayist and democratic socialist. His experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37) sharpened his lifelong opposition to totalitarianism.

London-born engraver, painter, poet and radical visionary. Lived in London his entire life. Combined poetry with hand-coloured illuminated printing to publish his own work.

Founder of English Romanticism, born in Cumbria. Co-wrote the Lyrical Ballads (1798) with Coleridge. Was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death. The Prelude was published posthumously in 1850.

George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron. Aristocratic, scandalous, charismatic Romantic poet. Created the "Byronic hero." Died of fever at Missolonghi while supporting the Greek War of Independence.

English Romantic poet and political radical, expelled from Oxford for atheism. Drowned in a sailing accident off the Italian coast aged 29. Husband of Mary Shelley.

English Romantic poet. Trained as a surgeon before turning to poetry. Died of tuberculosis in Rome aged 25.

Poet Laureate from 1850 until his death - the longest tenure in the role's history. Wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" within minutes of reading the Times report of the disastrous Battle of Balaclava charge in October 1854.

English poet; sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Devout High Anglican; lifelong illness (Graves' disease) gave mortality a constant presence in her work.

English novelist and poet, born in Dorset. Hardy's poetry is Victorian in its reach but pre-modernist in its bleakness. Lost his religious faith partly under the influence of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).

English poet who served as an officer in the Manchester Regiment on the Western Front. Met Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart military hospital in 1917, an encounter that shaped his mature anti-war poetry. Killed in action on 4 November 1918, just one week before the Armistice.

Anglo-Irish poet (note the hyphenated surname Day-Lewis). Part of the politically-engaged 1930s generation alongside Auden and Spender. UK Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972.

Anglo-American poet. Emigrated to the United States in 1939 and took US citizenship in 1946. Prolific essayist and librettist as well as poet.

Cornish poet, born and died in Launceston. Served in the Royal Navy in WWII; afterwards taught for many years at his old primary school. His father died from war injuries when Causley was seven.

Yorkshire-born English poet. Husband of Sylvia Plath (married 1956-1963). UK Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.

English poet and clinical psychologist working in the NHS. Began publishing poetry relatively late in her career.

Northern Irish poet, born in County Derry. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Boston University professor of poetry. His childhood on a Catholic farm in rural Ulster underpins much of his early work.

English poet, novelist and critic.

British-Caribbean poet, playwright and children's writer; born in British Guiana (now Guyana) and moved to England in 1977. Uses Caribbean Creole alongside Standard English to interrogate colonialism, race and identity.

Pakistani-born British poet, artist and documentary filmmaker. Born in Lahore, raised in Glasgow, has lived in India. Awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014.

Glasgow-born Scottish poet. UK Poet Laureate 2009-2019 - the first woman, first Scot and first openly LGBTQ+ person to hold the role. Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

British dub poet, novelist, playwright and rights campaigner; born in Birmingham to Jamaican and Barbadian parents. Died on 7 January 2023.

British poet and textile designer; has lived in Italy, England and Northern Ireland.

Yorkshire-born English poet, originally trained as a probation officer. Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds; Oxford Professor of Poetry 2015-2019. Appointed UK Poet Laureate in May 2019.

Sri Lankan-born British BBC journalist, broadcaster and author. Reported from sub-Saharan Africa for the BBC for many years; later anchor of BBC News at Six. Died on 24 July 2023.