The title ‘Companion of Literature’ was inaugurated in 1961, and is held by up to ten writers at any one time.

At the moment the honour is held by:

Patrick Leigh Fermor
Michael Frayn
Seamus Heaney
Michael Holroyd
Doris Lessing
V.S. Naipaul
Peter Porter
Tom Stoppard
William Trevor

All Companions of Literature have visited the Society and addressed its Fellows and Members in recent years.

Past recipients

Sir Winston Churchill
E.M. Forster
John Masefield
W. Somerset Maugham
G.M. Trevelyan
Edmund Blunden
Aldous Huxley
Dame Edith Sitwell
Evelyn Waugh
Elizabeth Bowen
Cecil Day-Lewis
Sir Osbert Sitwell
Sir John Betjeman
Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett
Sir Compton Mackenzie
Dame Rebecca West
Lord David Cecil
Cyril Connolly
L.P. Hartley
Sir Angus Wilson
Ruth Pitter
Lord Clark
Arthur Koestler
Philip Larkin
David Garnett
Sir Stephen Spender
Samuel Beckett
William Golding
Graham Greene
Rosamund Lehmann
Dame Iris Murdoch
Sir Victor Pritchett
The Hon Sir Steven Runciman
Anthony Burgess
Dame Muriel Spark
Sybille Bedford
Harold Pinter