The Management Committee is responsible for the overall running of the Society. The General Secretary and her staff report to the Management Committee. The authors serving on the Committee are listed below.
Members wanting to raise policy matters with the Society are welcome to contact the General Secretary in the first instance. Members with individual questions or queries on professional matters are encouraged to consult our Advisory Service, headed by Kate Pool, at any time.
Click here to read about the Management Committee Elections 2011
Lindsey Davis (Chair) is a historical novelist, best known for her twenty volume mystery series featuring Roman detective, Marcus Didius Falco, with its recent addition of Falco: the Official Companion, a cheery handbook for readers. She has also written Rebels and Traitors, an epic novel set in the English Civil War and Commonwealth. She has won the CWA Historical Dagger, Dagger in the Library, and a Sherlock for Best Detective. She has been Honorary President of the Classical Association and Chair of the Crimewriters Association. In 2009 she was awarded the Premio de Honor de Novela Historica by the City of Zaragoza and in 2010 the city of Rome gave her the Premio Colosseo, awarded 'for enhancing the image of Rome'. She is currently writing a novel set in the reign of the Emperor Domitian and much enjoying the paranoia. See: www.lindseydavis.co.uk
Photo: © Stuart Clarke
Patrick Barwise is emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School, a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford, and chairman of the consumer organization Which?. He has a range of research and consulting interests in management, marketing, and media. His book, Simply Better (co-authored with Seán Meehan, IMD, Lausanne), won the American Marketing Association’s 2005 Berry-AMA Book Prize. Their follow-up book, Beyond the Familiar, was published in March 2011. He is married to the social historian Catherine Horwood (Keeping Up Appearances, Gardening Women).
Nicholas Clee was Editor of the Bookseller from 1999 to 2004, and before that was the paper’s Book News Editor (1984-1999). He writes about books and the book industry for the Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, and NewBooks magazine, and is Contributing Editor of the UK Book Publishing Industry Statistics Yearbook. He was food columnist for the New Statesman from January 2007 to September 2008, and has also written for the Observer Sports Monthly. He has been a judge of the Booker Prize, Encore Award and Granta Best of Young British Novelists. He is the author of Don’t Sweat the Aubergine: What Works in the Kitchen and Why (Short Books) and Eclipse: The Story of the Rogue, the Madam and the Horse That Changed Racing (Bantam Press).
Photo: © Naomi Schillinger
Gregor Dallas Gregor Dallas is the author of many critically-acclaimed works of European history. Born in London, he was educated in Britain and the United States, has taught in American universities, and now lives in France where he set up a French section of the Society of Authors (SOAF) in 2006. See: www.gd-frontiers.net
Juliet Gardiner is a historian and writer. She was editor of History Today in the 1980s and continues to work as the magazine's review editor. She has also been an academic, publisher (at Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and, since 2001, a full time writer. Her books include the Penguin Dictionary of British History (ed.) Wartime: Britain 1939-45, The Children's War and most recently The Thirties: an intimate history and The Blitz: the British under attack. She has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and won the Audio Book of the Year Award in 2006 with Fiona Shaw's reading of Wartime. She is also a frequent speaker, reviewer for national newspapers and magazines and broadcaster both on radio and television and is one of the regular presenters of Nightwaves on Radio Three. Her historical consultancy credits include The 1940s House, The Edwardian Country House, Upstairs Downstairs (new series), Turn Back Time: The High Street and the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. She is currently working on a book about the Home Front in Britain in the First World War - and lives in East London, fortunately fairly close to her three children and several grandchildren. See: www.julietgardiner.com
Philip Gross is a writer of many parts: poet, writer of fiction for young people, haiku and schools opera libretti, plays and radio short stories. His poetry has won a clutch of recent awards - The Water Table (2009) the TS Eliot Prize, I Spy Pinhole Eye, with photographs by Simon Denison (2009) Wales Book of the Year and Off Road To Everywhere the CLPE Award for children's poetry 2011. A new collection, Deep Field, deals with his refugee father's loss of language in old age. He is also the author of ten teenage novels - most recently The Storm Garden. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University, has worked with schools and adult groups for thirty years and brings to the committee an awareness of the needs of learning, aspiring, not-yet-established writers as well as his own experience of solo and collaborative work in many forms. See: www.philipgross.co.uk
Photo: © Stephen Morris
Anthony Horowitz is best known for his Alex Rider series of books for young adults which have now sold twelve million copies worldwide - but he is also a prolific writer for theatre, cinema and TV. His television work includes Midsomer Murders, Murder in Mind and Poirot. He created the longrunning series, Foyle's War which won the Lew Grade award at BAFTA in 2003 and more recently the critically- acclaimed five-part series, Collision, which was shown over five nights on ITV. In 2011 he was commissioned to write a brand new Sherlock Holmes novel, the first time the Conan Doyle estate had given their approval to a modern author. He lives in Clerkenwell with his wife, his two sons and his increasingly decrepid dog but spends as much time as he can in Suffolk.
Graham Joyce wrote his first novel (Dreamside, 1991) after quitting a job in youth work to live in a shack on a Greek island in 1989 and has been writing professionally ever since. Since then he has produced twelve adult novels, four Young Adult novels, a collection of short stories and a non-fiction work. He has also adapted his work for Hollywood screenplays. His forthcoming novel The Silent Land has been optioned by Focus Features in Hollywood. His short story An Ordinary Soldier Of The Queen won the 2009 O Henry prize in the United States. He was given the World Fantasy Award for The Facts Of Life (2003) and has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel an unprecedented five times, most recently for Memoirs of A Master Forger (under the pen-name of William Heaney). He has also won the French Grand Prix De L’Imaginaire and the Angus Award. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is a Ph.D who also teaches Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. Married with two children, he lives in Leicester UK. See: www.grahamjoyce.net
Photo: © Charlie James
David Kynaston was born in 1951, read Modern History at Oxford University in the early 1970s, and since then has predominantly been a self-employed historian. His books include four corporate histories (including a centenary history of the Financial Times), three books on cricket history and a four-volume history of the City of London, 1815-2000. He is currently engaged on a multi-volume history of Britain between 1945 and 1979. The first two volumes, Austerity Britain and Family Britain, were published in 2007 and 2009 respectively, and he is currently working on a third volume, Modernity Britain, to cover the years 1957 to 1963. He lives in New Malden (a suburb in south-west London) and is married with three children.
James Runcie is The Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival, which runs for ten days each Spring and features over 200 writers. He is the author of four novels (published by Harper Collins and Bloomsbury) and his six-part crime series, The Grantchester Mysteries, will be published by Bloomsbury beginning in May 2012. He also makes documentary films that have featured writers as diverse as J.K. Rowling, Hilary Mantel, J.G Ballard and Umberto Eco; as well as arts series with well known presenters across all the main television networks. He served on the Arts Council Literature Panel from 1991-1995 and is also a regular contributor to Saturday Review on Radio 4. See: jamesruncie.com
Photo: © Tim Cragg
Anne Sebba is a journalist, author and broadcaster. Her first job was in the Arabic Services of the BBC. She left this for Reuters in London and Rome where for six years she worked as a foreign correspondent. Since then Anne has written nine non-fiction books including Battling For News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter, The Exiled Collector, William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House, Enid Bagnold: A Life; Laura Ashley: A Life by Design; Mother Teresa, Beyond the Image and Jennie Churchill, Winston’s American Mother. Her books have been translated into Czech, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Japanese and Zulu. Anne has an interest in the future of biographies in the digital age and has addressed a British Library Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Memory where scientists and doctors examined the issue with writers and broadcasters. She has written a number of short stories and presented documentaries for radio including the Daffodil Maiden for BBC Radio 3 about the pianist Harriet Cohen and in 2010 Who was Joyce Hatto for BBC Radio 4. She has been on the Executive of English PEN, (twice) is a member of the Richmond Arts Council Books Advisory Committee and is a trustee of YAD, a charity that aims to bring Palestinians and Israelis together through culture. She lectures to a wide variety of clubs and institutions, including Nadfas, and her latest publication is a biography of Wallis Simpson called That Woman, published in 2011. See: www.annesebba.com
Sarah Waters was born in Pembrokeshire in 1966, and now lives in London. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University. Her five novels are: Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006) and The Little Stranger (2009). Fingersmith, The Night Watch and The Little Stranger were all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Fingersmith and The Night Watch were also shortlisted for the Orange Prize. In 2003 Sarah was included in Granta’s prestigious list of ‘Best of Young British Novelists'. Three of her novels have been adapted for television.
Co-opted Members of the Management Committee
Maureen Freely
Biography to follow.
Alison Joseph heads the Broadcasting Group and is a London-based crime writer and radio dramatist. She started her career as a television researcher, then director, in documentaries, mostly for Channel 4. In 1993 she became a writer full-time. Alison has written about twenty works for radio, including The True Story and One Down, which was an interactive daily drama with input via a website. She has also done various dramatisations, including Georges Simenon’s Maigret, and abridgements for Book at Bedtime and Book of the Week on Radio 4. She is the author of the series of novels featuring Sister Agnes, a contemporary detective nun based in South London. The ninth in the series, A Violent Act, has just been published in hardback. Sister Agnes has also featured in her own drama series on BBC Radio 4. All the Sister Agnes books are now available as e-books. Alison is currently working on a radio comedy series starring June Whitfield, co-written with Andy Merriman, to be broadcast in 2012. Her next crime novel, a departure from Sister Agnes, is about particle physics. See: http://alisonjoseph.com
Photo: © Hugo Glendinning
Angus Konstam represents the Society of Authors in Scotland. He is an acclaimed historian, with over sixty books in print. He is also one of the world’s leading authorities on piracy. A former naval officer and underwater archaeologist, he then spent ten years as a museum curator, working on both sides of the Atlantic. He is now a full-time writer, living in Edinburgh. His most recent books include Blackbeard, Sovereigns of the Sea, Piracy: The Complete History, and There was a Soldier. See: www.anguskonstam.com
Hilary Parnall represents the Educational Writers Group. She is a writer of ELT materials, and has written and co-written course books, supplementary materials, videos and CD-ROMs for various publishers. She is also currently Chief Inspector for the British Council Accreditation UK scheme.
Helena Pielichaty (Pierre-li-hatty) never planned to be a writer. The seeds were sown as a teacher during the late 1970s/early 1980s when she wrote short plays and customised worksheets for her pupils. This created a nagging restlessness in her that she couldn’t fathom until she took maternity leave and moved to Nottinghamshire. In 1987, needing a diversion from discussing the merits of disposable nappies with other new mums, she enrolled on a creative writing course run by the Workers' Educational Association. The course, held in a leaky Scout and Guide Hut only lasted for six weeks but she describes it as ‘…like turning on a tap… one that I couldn’t turn off again.’ Helena has produced over thirty books for children across the age range. Her current series, Girls FC, is based around an under 11s all-girl football team.
