• 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)

Fiona Sampson – Year of election 2010

Fiona Sampson, a poet and critic,has published seventeen books.  She has won the Newdigate Prize, been short-listed for the Forward single-poem and T.S. Eliot Prize received writers’ awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, and, in 2009, received a Cholmondeley Award.  She is published in more than thirty languages, and as a translator she has been instrumental in making available some of the best poetry from Central and Balkan Europe, where she is well-known and respected as poet, editor and translator.  She describes her day-job, as editor of Poetry Review, as “advocating our best poetry – and not only what’s fashionable – to the general reader.”