2004 Judges

Chris Smith (Chair)

He is the Labour Party’s nominee on the Committee on Standards in Public Life; is Chairman of the Wordsworth Trust; Chairman of the Donmar Warehouse Theatre; and a Member of the Board of the National Theatre.  He is also a Visiting Professor in Culture and the Creative Industries at the London Institute.

Chris Smith was educated at Cambridge, where he gained a double first in English, and at Harvard, where he was a Kennedy Scholar.  He wrote his PhD thesis on the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge.  He has recently presented television programmes on the work of Auden, Eliot and Larkin, and on Emily Bronte.   A lifelong hill walker and mountaineer, Chris has scaled the 284 mountains above 3,000 ft in Scotland.

Tibor Fischer

Tibor Fischer was born in 1959 in Stockport to Hungarian parents. He grew up in South London before going to Cambridge University to study Latin and French. He has worked as a journalist and was selected as one of the ‘20 Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta in 1993.

His first novel Under the Frog won the Betty Trask Award in 1992, and was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993. He is the author of three other novels, The Thought Gang, The Collector Collector, Voyage to the End of the Room and a collection of short stories Don’t Read This Book If You’re Stupid.

He lives in South London.

Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane was born in 1976 and is a writer, critic and academic. After studying at Cambridge and Oxford, and teaching in Beijing, he was made Fellow in English Literature at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2002.
 
His book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, a travel-history about the Western love affair with mountains, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2003. He writes regularly on fiction for, among other publications, the Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, The London Review of Books and The Observer.
 
His Ph.D. was on George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. At Cambridge, he teaches and lectures on Anglo-American fiction since 1945, post-modern theory, literature and environmentalism, and the history of the novel.

He spends most of his spare time either reading, or walking and climbing in mountains around the world, and lives in Cambridge.

Rowan Pelling

Rowan Pelling was born in 1968 in Kent. She studied English at Oxford and then went worked at Private Eye as Ian Hislop’s PA and editorial assistant. After stints at GQ and the Erotic Print Society, in 1997 she founded The Erotic Review, which she continues to edit.

Rowan Pelling is a regular guest on Radio Four’s Saturday Review and contributes to various programmes on Radio Three and Radio Four. She has appeared on numerous TV programmes including Question Time, Newsnight, Panorama and The Soul of Britain, BBC Four’s Before the Booker (championing Jane Austen’s Persuasion victoriously), and BBC Four’s The Big Read.

Her print journalism includes writing a weekly column, "This is the Life", for the Independent on Sunday and a bi-monthly column for Jack Magazine.

Fiammetta Rocco

Fiammetta Rocco was born in Kenya to French and Italian parents and read Arabic at Oxford. She went straight on to work as a journalist covering Africa and the Middle East. A journalist for the past twenty years, she was named "British Feature Writer of the Year" in the UK Press Awards, and twice "Best Magazine Writer" by the Overseas Press Club of America.

A contributor to Vanity Fair, Independent on Sunday and International Investor, she’s now the literary editor of The Economist. Her first book, The Miraculous Fever Tree, described by the New York Times last September as "an exceedingly accomplished work", was published in 2004.

A speaker of six languages she now lives in London with her husband and her daughter.