• 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)

Robin Robertson – Year of election 2009

Robin Robertson has made a clean sweep of the Forward Prizes, winning Best First Collection, Best Single Poem and Best Collection, and has also won the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  His translations of the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer were extremely well-received, as was his version of Euripides’ Medea. His fourth poetry collection, The Wrecking Light, was published in February, and described by the Guardian as “a work of extraordinary visionary power, its music bleak and beautiful, spare and unsparing.” “If there were justice in the world,” this critic added, “it would win every prize going.”