William Fiennes – Year of election 2009

William Fiennes’s first book, The Snow Geese, published in 2002, was a travel book in a genre of its own, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winning the Hawthornden Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. In 2003 its author was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. He then tried to be a novelist. “Naively,” he told an interviewer, “I thought if your first book did well, you’d reach this magical plateau of being a writer, and that other books would come easily. The career seemed over. I sent off for the application forms for the civil service; I looked into fast-tracking as a GP. But the real problem was that I didn’t care about the characters in those attempted novels. I only wanted to write out of strong feeling, and, once I realised that, I knew what to do.” His second book, The Music Room, published in April, a memoir of childhood and of his severely epileptic brother, has been called “a small masterpiece”.

Fiennes spent two years as Fellow in the Creative Arts at Wolfson College, Oxford, and has been Writer-in-Residence at the American School in London, and, since 2007, at Cranford Community College, in Hounslow. He is a director and co-founder of the charity First Story, which supports creativity and literacy in challenging secondary schools.