- Paul Bailey
- Michael Baldwin
- Iain Banks
- John Banville
- Richard Barber
- Juliet Barker
- Pat Barker CBE
- Sebastian Barker
- Frank Barlow CBE FBA FRHistS
- Correlli Barnett CBE
- Sebastian Barry
- Jacques Barzun
- Susan Bassnett
- Jonathan Bate CBE FBA
- Nina Bawden CBE
- Martin Bax
- John Bayley CBE FBA
- C.A. Bayly FBA FRHistS
- Dame Gillian Beer DBE FBA
- Antony Beevor
- Rosalind Belben
- Anne Olivier Bell
- Bernard Bergonzi
- Christopher Bigsby
- Dea Birkett
- Julia Blackburn
- Malorie Blackman
- Ronald Blythe, Benson Medallist
- James T. Boulton FBA
- William Boyd CBE
- Melvyn Bragg (Lord Bragg)
- Piers Brendon
- Raymond Briggs
- Robin Briggs
- Michael Brock CBE FRHistS
- Hugh Brogan
- Anita Brookner CBE
- Alan Brownjohn
- James Buchan
- Brian Burland
- John Burnside
- Marilyn Butler FBA
- A.S. Byatt (Dame Antonia Duffy DBE)
Jennifer Johnston – Year of election 2009
Jennifer Johnston is an Irish writer – Ireland, she has said, is her
“main theme” – and the author of more than a dozen novels. The daughter
of a writer and an actress, she only started writing at the age of 35.
“I just woke up one morning,” she said, “and thought, ‘I must do
something with my life.’ ” Her first novel, The Captains and the Kings, published in 1972, won the Author's Club First Novel Award, and The Old Jest
(1979) took the Whitbread Novel Award. Five years ago Roddy Doyle
caused outrage at a Joyce gathering in New York when he said that Ulysses needed a good editor and that James Joyce was not the best Irish writer – that title was Jennifer Johnston's.
“She has created a world of her own,” Derek Mahon has written. “Of such material is the finest literature made.”