Lisa Jardine CBE (Chair)
Professor Jardine is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who combines a scholarly career as a historian with a high media profile. She was the first woman fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge. She is currently Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
She has written a number of books for the general reader, her latest, On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Christopher Wren, was published by HarperCollins in September 2002. She has a particular interest in contemporary writing and reviews regularly for numerous newspapers and magazines. She has been a presenter on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves, Radio 4’s Start the Week and Channel’s 4’s Powerhouse. She judged the 1996 Whitbread Prize, the 1999 Guardian First Book Award, the 2000 Orwell Prize and was Chair of Judges for the 1997 Orange Prize and the 2002 Man Booker Prize.
David Baddiel
David Baddiel began his career as a writer and comedian after graduating from Cambridge with a double first in English Literature in 1986, performing on the London stand-up comedy circuit and writing sketches for BBC Radio 4’s Weekending. He wrote a PhD thesis on Victorian sexuality and literature at University College London but never submitted it. Television credits include The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Fantasy Football League, Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, and three series of Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned.
His debut novel, Time for Bed, was published in 1995, his second novel, Whatever Love Means, was published in 1999 and his most recent The Secret Poppies was published in 2004. He also wrote and starred in the sitcom Baddiel’s Syndrome in 2001.
He was a judge for the Guardian First Book Award in 2000 and participated in the live discussion panel on BBC TV for the 1998, 1999 and 2000 Whitbread Book Awards. He was a panelist for the 2001 People’s Booker on BBC TV, and was a live commentator on the prize-night itself and went on to be part of the judging panel for the 2002 Man Booker Prize.
Russell Celyn Jones
Russell Celyn Jones is the author of seven novels, including Soldiers and Innocents, which won the David Higham Prize in 1990, An Interference of Light (Society of Authors Award), The Eros Hunter and Surface Tension. His stories have been anthologised in various publications along with a range of short stories. He has taught in the Creative Writing MA programme at the University of East Anglia.
He was a judge for the 1998 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize judge, The Booker prize in 2002 and The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize in 2008.
Salley Vickers
Salley Vickers was born in Liverpool, the home of her mother and grew up as the child of parents in the British Communist Party. Her father was a trade union leader and her mother a social worker. She won a state scholarship to St Paul’s Girl’s School (something which caused her father some anxiety because of his dislike of public schools and for a while he felt that she should not attend the school) and went on to read English at Newnham College Cambridge, with which she recently renewed working ties. She has worked, variously, as a cleaner, a dancer, an artist’s model, a teacher of children with special needs, a university teacher of literature and a psychoanalyst. Her first novel, ‘Miss Garnet’s Angel’, became an international word-of-mouth bestseller and a favourite among book clubs and reading groups. She now writes full time and lectures widely on many subjects, particularly the connections between, art, literature, psychology and religion.
Erica Wagner
Erica Wagner has been Literary Editor of The Times since 1996. In 1990-91 she studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, tutored by Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. Gravity, a collection of short stories, was published by Granta in 1997; Ariel’s Gift, a book about Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, was published by Faber and Faber in 2000. She was previously a judge of the Orange Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Forward Prize for Poetry and the David Cohen Prize. Her short stories are frequently anthologised and she is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 and is a regular reviewer for The New York Times.
