Kenneth Baker (Chair)
Kenneth Baker was born in 1934 and educated at St. Paul’s and Magdalen College, Oxford. He entered Parliament as Conservative MP for Acton in 1968, beginning a long Parliamentary career which included serving as Environment Secretary, Education Secretary and Home Secretary. As Education Secretary he was responsible for the introduction of the National Curriculum, City Technology Colleges and Grant-Maintained Schools. Retiring from the House of Commons at the 1997 General Election, he joined the House of Lords.
Kenneth Baker’s publications include five anthologies of poetry and a volume of memoirs, The Turbulent Years and two cartoon histories, The Prime Ministers and The Kings and Queens. The Faber Children’s History in Verse was published in Spring 2000 and a new anthology, The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry in autumn 2000.
Kenneth Baker is founder and Chairman of Belmont Press (London Ltd.), a company which specialises in fine limited editions of contemporary writing.
Philip Hensher
Philip Hensher is a columnist for The Independent, art critic for The Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British novelist. He has written five novels, Other Lulus, Kitchen Venom (Winner of the Somerset Maughn Award), Pleasured, the Booker-longlisted The Mulberry Empire and The Fit, as well as a collection of short stories, The Bedroom of the Mister’s House
His novels are Other Lulus, Kitchen Venom (1996) which won the Somerset Maugham award and Pleasured (1998) as well as a collection of short stories, The Bedroom of The Mister’s Wife (1999). Philip Hensher also wrote the libretto for Thomas Ades’s opera, Powder Her Face (1995), The Fit, 2004 and his most recent The Northern Clemency, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008.
Michèle Roberts
Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts was born in 1949. She is the author of ten highly praised novels which include A Piece of the Night (1978), Daughters of the House (1992), shortlisted for Booker Prize and winner of the WH Smith Literary Award 1993, Flesh & Blood (1994), and The Looking Glass (2000). She has also published a collection of short stories, During Mother’s Absence (1993), three books of poetry including All the Selves I Was: Selected Poems 1986-1994 (1995), a book of essays, On Food, Sex and God: On Inspiration and Writing (1998) and co-authored four volumes of short stories.
Michele is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
Kate Summerscale
Kate Summerscale was educated at Oxford and Stanford universities. She has previously worked as obituaries editor of the Daily Telegraph and as editor of the Independent on Sunday’s magazine.
Her first book, The Queen of Whale Cay, a biography of Joe Carstairs (Fourth Estate), was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread biography award and won a Somerset Maugham award in 1998. Her second book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in 2008.
Professor Rory Watson
Rory Watson was born in Aberdeen and is a Professor in English Studies and Director of the Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Stirling. He has been General Editor of Canongate Classics since its inception in 1987. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was chairman of The Scottish Book Trust from 1995 to 2000 and chairman of the Judges for the McVitie’s Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year (1992 - 1995).
Professor Watson has written and lectured widely on Scottish literature and cultural identity, in particular on Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Edwin Morgan. His work includes The Literature of Scotland, The Poetry of Scotland, and he is co-author of The Penguin Book of the Bicycle. His own poetry has featured in various collections, as well as in numerous magazines and anthologies.
