2007 Judges

Howard Davies (Chair)

Sir Howard Davies is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously he was Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, the UK’s single financial regulator since 1998. He had previously served for two years as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, after three years as Director General of the Confederation of British Industry. During 1985-1986 Davies was seconded to the Treasury as Special Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Since 2002 he has been a Trustee of the Tate. In addition to his high profile business and academic activities, Howard Davies is also an avid reader. He was a regular fiction reviewer for The Literary Review for many years, and has also reviewed fiction for Books and Bookmen and The Times. He reads novels in English and French and is a member of the Powys and Wyndham Lewis Societies. Davies is a member of the governing body, Royal Academy of Music; Patron of Working Families; and in 2004 was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.

Wendy Cope

Poet Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent in 1945 and read History at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She trained as a teacher at Westminster College of Education, Oxford, and taught in primary schools in London (1967-81 and 1984-6). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts and Letters) in 1995. Her poetry collections include Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992) and If I Don’t Know (2001), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. She has edited a number of poetry anthologies and she is also the author of two books for children, Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988) and The River Girl (1991). Wendy Cope is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Winchester, England. In 1998 she was the listeners’ choice in a BBC Radio 4 poll to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate.

Giles Foden

Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967 but grew up mostly in Africa. Educated at Fitzwilliam and St John’s Colleges Cambridge, where he held the Harper-Wood studentship in creative writing, he was then for three years an assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Between 1995 and 2006 he worked on the books pages of the Guardian. His novel The Last King of Scotland, published in 1998, won a Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. It has recently been made into a feature film starring Forest Whitaker and won several BAFTAs including The Alexander Korda Award for the Outstanding British Film of the Year. Foden has published two other novels, Ladysmith and Zanzibar, and a work of narrative non-fiction, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth. He is currently AHRC Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Ruth Scurr

Ruth Scurr was born in 1971 in London. In 1989 she went up to Oxford to read English, but changed after a year to study Politics and Philosophy. She was admitted to Cambridge for a Master’s course in Social and Political Theory in 1993, and then stayed to complete a PhD and British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellowship in the Department of Politics. In 1996 she spent a year in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Her doctorate was on the political thought of the French Revolution. Ruth Scurr began reviewing regularly for The Times and the Times Literary Supplement in 1997. Since then she has also published in The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The New Statesman, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Nation and The New York Observer. Fatal Purity – Robespierre and the French Revolution (Chatto and Windus, 2006) is Ruth Scurr’s first book. Ruth Scurr is an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Politics at Cambridge, and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences for Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where she is a Fellow.

Imogen Stubbs

Imogen attended St Paul’s and Westminster schools and won a scholarship to read English at Exeter College Oxford. She left Oxford with a first class degree and went to RADA. Since then she has acted in television, film and theatre, including time at the National and the RSC, in roles ranging from Desdemona, Gertrude, Viola, Saint Joan and the Duchess of Malfi, to Ursula in The Rainbow, Lucy in Sense and Sensibility, Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Anna in Closer and Stella in A Street Car Named Desire. She has written for many newspapers and magazines including reviews for The Times and a column for the Daily Telegraph, and is co-author of Amazonians: Penguin Book of Women’s New Travel Writing. Her travel writing has taken her to around the world. Imogen Stubbs has also co-written and directed the short film Snow on Saturday, which won the UCI Award for Best British Short. She wrote a play We Happy Few which was performed at Malvern Theatre and then at the Gielgud Theatre in London.