- 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
Sarah Waters – Year of election 2009
Sarah Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet, published in 1998 when she was 32, was a Victorian “romp” of which The Independent on Sunday
asked, “Could this be a new genre? The bawdy lesbian picaresque novel?”
It won a Betty Trask Award and was serialised on BBC television in
2002. Her novels since have been Affinity, which won a Somerset Maugham Award and was also adapted for television, Fingersmith, again adapted, and winner of the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and the South Bank Show Award for Literature, The Night Watch and The Little Stranger. In 2003 she was named one of Granta’s 20 Best of Young British Novelists.
Waters,
who lives in south London, finds city-living, she says, “a constant
source of inspiration. I love the fact that the layers of London's
history are still so visible on its streets. I love the crowdedness of
London. It’s a place full of stories; and stories – and how best to
tell them – are what really interest me as a writer.”