- Lawrence Sail
- Giles St Aubyn LVO
- William St Clair FBA
- Norman St John-Stevas (Lord St John of Fawsley)
- Fiona Sampson
- J.J. Scarisbrick FRHistS
- Ann Schlee
- Michael Schmidt
- The Rev Professor M.A. Screech FBA
- Roger Scruton FBA
- Peter Scupham
- Simon Sebag-Montefiore
- Elisa Segrave
- Richard Sennett
- Vikram Seth CBE
- Miranda Seymour
- Sir Peter Shaffer CBE
- Nicholas Shakespeare
- Kamila Shamsie
- Jo Shapcott
- Norman Sherry
- Elaine Showalter
- Posy Simmonds MBE
- Helen Simpson
- Andrew Sinclair
- Clive Sinclair
- Iain Sinclair
- Robert Skidelsky (Lord Skidelsky of Tilton FBA FRHistS)
- Ali Smith
- Godfrey Smith
- Lacey Baldwin Smith FRHistS
- Zadie Smith
- Mary Soames (Baroness Soames LG)
- Ahdaf Soueif
- Frances Spalding CBE
- Francis Spufford
- Hilary Spurling CBE
- John Spurling
- Tom Stacey
- Jon Stallworthy FBA
- Martin Stannard
- Edward St Aubyn
- C.K. Stead ONZ CBE
- George Steiner FBA
- Rory Stewart OBE MP
- Stanley Stewart
- Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE C Lit
- Sir Roy Strong FSA
- Kate Summerscale
- Virginia Surtees
- John Sutherland
- Graham Swift
- George Szirtes
Nicholas Rankin – Year of election 2009
Nicholas Rankin first learned to read in Kenya during Mau-Mau, and says he has been sheltering in books ever since. His first book, Dead Man’s Chest (1987), following Robert Louis Stevenson from Scotland to Samoa, told how he read Stevenson’s Fables aloud to Jorge Luis Borges; Graham Greene called it “a most enjoyable travel book”. Rankin worked for 20 years at BBC World Service, ending up as Chief Producer (Arts), and made radio features on writers from Honoré de Balzac and Miguel de Cervantes to Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell. His second book, Telegram from Guernica, was a biography of the neglected war correspondent George Lowther Steer.
His most recent work, Churchill’s Wizards: the British genius for deception 1914-1945, published in 2008, is a study of writers and artists at war. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Michael Bywater called it “a book of marvellous yarns”.