2006 Judges
Hermione Lee (Chair)
Hermione Lee is a biographer, an academic and a reviewer. Since 1998 she has been the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of New College Oxford (the first woman to take these posts). Before that she taught at the University of York for twenty years and has also worked at the University of Liverpool and in the States.
As a writer, she is best-known for her prize-winning and influential biography of Virginia Woolf (1996). Her other books have all been on fiction-writers, American, Irish and English. They include critical studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, editions of Penelope Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Trollope and Kipling, and an anthology of short stories by women (The Secret Self). In 2005 she published a collection of essays on biography called Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing. She is just completing a new biography of Edith Wharton, to be published in January 2007. She reviews widely, especially for The Guardian and BBC’s Front Row. Her radio features include, most recently, two BBC programmes made with Julian Barnes on Edith Wharton and Henry James in France, and on Kipling in the First World War.
She was on the 1981 Booker Prize judging panel when the prize was awarded to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which was the "Booker of Bookers". in 1993. In the 1980s she presented Channel Four’s first books programme, Book Four, and co-presented the Booker Prize coverage with Melvyn Bragg. In 2003 she was made a CBE for services to literature.
Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in West Yorkshire. He has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and currently teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published nine volumes of poetry including Killing Time, 1999 (Faber & Faber) and Selected Poems, 2001 (Faber & Faber) His most recent collections are The Universal Home Doctor and Travelling Songs, both published by Faber & Faber in 2002. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award. He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays, including ‘Mister Heracles’, a version of the Euripides play ‘The Madness of Heracles’. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA. His first novel, Little Green Man, was published by Penguin in 2001. His second novel The White Stuff was published in 2004. His new book, a dramatised version of Homer’s Odyssey will be published in July 2006 along with his latest poetry collection Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid.
Candia McWilliam
Candia McWilliam is a homesick Scot, born in Edinburgh in 1955 but resident in Oxford. She has three children. She is a novelist and reviewer, of fiction, biography and poetry, and has written a number of introductions to such classic works as the first three James Bond novels, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Wreath of Roses and The Golden Bowl. She has been lucky enough to have been the recipient of some literary prizes, including the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novels are A Case of Knives, A Little Stranger and Debatable Land. She has also written a book of short stories, Wait Till I Tell You. She has been on several prize-judging panels, always aware of the inherent difficulties of the whole thing, but aware too of what it can mean to a writer to be read and for a reader to be brought to a writer.
Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. He was educated at St. Francis Xavier’s College for Boys and then at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he read Classics. He has been a freelance writer and reviewer since 1987, and has contributed to various magazines and newspapers including The Daily Telegraph, The Observer and The New York Times. For three years he was the arts editor of Harpers & Queen. Since 1998 he has been the film critic of The Independent. His main pastime is reading, which is probably just as well.
Fiona Shaw
Fiona Shaw studied at RADA and has extensive experience with the Royal National Theatre, as well as credits for films as diverse as The Butcher Boy (1997), Richard II (1997), My Left Foot (1989) and Harry Potter (2001, 2002, 2004). Still first and foremost a stage performer, she was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Actress in 1990 for Electra, As You Like It and The Person of Sichaun and again in 1994 for her performance for Machinal at the Royal National Theatre. In 1995 she was awarded the New York Critics’s Award for her performance in TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. She was also named Best Actress at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her performance in Machinal (1994) and again for Medea performed at the Queen’s Theatre in London (2002). In 1991 she was awarded the London Critics Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre Award) for Best Actress for her performance in Hedda Gabler, and in 1989 the London Critics Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre Award) for Best Actress for her performances in Electra and The Good Person of Sichuan. She was awarded an Officier des Arts et Lettres in France in 2000 and an honorary CBE in the 2001 New Years Honours.
