Private Passions

The American writer Garth Greenwell won widespread acclaim for his first novel, What Belongs to You, including the British Book Award for the Debut of the Year in 2016. This success would have surprised his high-school teachers in Kentucky. As a teenager, he failed English and decided to follow a very different path: he turned to singing and eventually trained as an opera singer. Studying music le...

Sarah Ogilvie is a lexicographer and a proud and self-confessed word nerd: languages are her passion and are at the heart of her writing and scholarship. She worked as an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary and went on to write a book about the thousands of volunteers around the world who submitted words for its first edition. She has researched endangered languages in Australia, North America...

The costume designer Jenny Beavan has won three Academy Awards for three very different films: the elegant Merchant Ivory drama Room with a View; the post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road; and most recently the Disney film Cruella, for which she created a huge, vibrant parade of 1970s-inspired fashion. She’s received a further nine Oscar nominations across her 40 year career. She found just the righ...

Lucian Msamati has played leading roles on our most famous stages: Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the National Theatre, Iago in Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Estragon opposite Ben Whishaw in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London. He started out performing – in his words – ‘for farmers sitting on beer crates in rural Africa, with tables for a stage’. And w...

Jay Rayner has his dream job: he loves writing and he loves food, and for the past 25 years he’s been the restaurant critic for the Observer. Jay is also familiar as a broadcaster, appearing as a judge on Masterchef, and hosting The Kitchen Cabinet on Radio 4. His recent book, Nights Out At Home, provides recipes to enable readers to create some of his favourite restaurant dishes in their own kitc...

Ann Cleeves is one of Britain’s most successful and prolific crime writers, reaching millions of readers around the world. She’s reached millions of television viewers too, with series including Vera and Shetland, adapted from her books. She has written on average a book a year for almost four decades, but success was anything but instant. She was 32 when her first title was published, and she onl...

Artist and printmaker Norman Ackroyd was born in Leeds in 1938. He fell in love with the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, riding around on his bicycle as a young boy and studied art despite his father believing it was a waste of time. He is now one of Britain's most acclaimed contemporary printmakers, with works in collections around the world including the Tate, Rijksmuseum and MoMA. Norman has...

Thomas Adès is one of the UK’s foremost and most successful composers. His first opera, Powder Her Face, was premiered in 1995, when he was just 24. With its racy subject matter, based on the life of the Duchess of Argyll, it put him squarely on the musical map, winning widespread critical acclaim. His catalogue now includes almost 90 works, with commissions from the world’s leading orchestras and...

The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket. Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s the tale of three unlucky orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sonny Baudelaire, who are hounded by their guardian, the sinister Count Olaf. The books are a phenomenon, selling more than 70 million copies a...

The director Clio Barnard won prizes and critical acclaim for her first feature film The Arbor: it blended fact and fiction to depict the short, troubled life of the brilliant Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. Since then she’s taken on a wide range of British stories. She directed Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in The Essex Serpent, a six part adaptation of the best-selling book by Sarah Perry....

Richard Thompson began his career as a guitarist and a songwriter when he was still a teenager – and six decades on, his passion for making and sharing music is as strong as ever. In the late 1960s he co-founded the pioneering folk-rock band Fairport Convention. In 1969 alone, they released three albums. All featured the voice of Sandy Denny, and one - Liege and Lief - was later acclaimed as the m...

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has long been passionate about food – not just about what we eat and how we cook it, but about how it’s produced and the wider environmental consequences of our appetites. He first appeared on our TV screens in 1995 in A Cook on the Wild Side - foraging for roadkill and frying up woodlouse fritters, earning him the nickname Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-it-all. He went on to doc...

Olivia Laing has won prizes and critical acclaim for her books, but readily admits that she led quite a wild life before becoming a writer: she dropped out of university, lived in a treehouse on an anti-road protest and later trained and worked as a herbalist. Her non-fiction books include The Trip to Echo Spring, which examined how writers who were damagingly addicted to alcohol could still produ...

Frank Gardner is the BBC’s security correspondent, familiar to millions of viewers and listeners from his reports, which regularly take him around the world. He’s also written six books, including a memoir about his 25 years in the Middle East, and more recently, four thrillers about the adventures of MI6 operative Luke Carlton. In 2004, while filming in Saudi Arabia, Frank and his cameraman Simon...

For years Professor Brian Cox has encouraged us to look up to and beyond the stars and to understand that the universe is very, very large and our place in it very, very small. He is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester – and through his extensive work on television and radio, he’s shared the wonders of the universe and of science with millions of us around the world. As a...

Dorothy Byrne has worked in journalism for more than 40 years, including almost 20 years as Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4 from 2003 to 2020. She talks to Michael Berkeley about the sexism and harassment she experienced as a young producer, which she detailed in her MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2019, in which she added that she would still recommend jou...

Imtiaz Dharker was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, and has published seven collections of her verse. She’s performed her poems to thousands of students at Poetry Live events, a scheme founded by her late husband Simon Rhys Powell. Imtiaz was born in Lahore in Pakistan and was six months old when her family moved to Glasgow. There she grew up as – in her words – “a Muslim Calvini...

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider – the huge particle detector buried deep underground at CERN near Geneva. He’s part of an international team of around 1,400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists studying the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics. Harry is also passionate about...

The American writer Percival Everett is enjoying a moment in the spotlight: his novel The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022; an earlier book, Erasure, was adapted into the recent Oscar-winning film American Fiction; and his latest novel, James, is already a best-seller in the United States. It’s a powerful re-telling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspec...

Alison Owen is one of the UK’s leading film producers. Her credits range from the zombie apocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead to Saving Mr Banks, the story of the making of the film Mary Poppins, starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks. Her most recent film is based on the short life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse and the making of her album Back to Black. Alison probably knows better than most wh...

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University – and her passion for her subject reaches far beyond the lecture hall or seminar room. She wants us all to understand how the writing and thinking of ancient Greece still influence how we write and think today. She leads a campaign called Advocating Classics Education, to promote teaching in state secondary schools, and her books include Ari...

Sathnam Sanghera is a best-selling writer and journalist. He grew up in Wolverhampton to Punjabi parents in a home where, in his words, “no one read books or owned them, let alone wrote them”. When he started school, he couldn’t speak English but he went on to graduate from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature. He started out writing for newspapers, win...

Professor Lady Sue Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. She says “I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.” Her painstaking work and expertise mean she can work out how people have met their end, and police forces, the Foreign Office and the UN have called on her evidence in countless high profi...

David Mitchell is the author of nine time-traversing, genre-bending novels. His first, Ghostwritten, was published 25 years ago, and his third, Cloud Atlas, made his name around the world, and later became a Hollywood film. It follows six interlocking lives in an ambitious narrative that circles the globe and travels through time from 19th-century New Zealand to a post-apocalyptic future in Hawaii...

John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to fly freely around at family mealtimes. In his later research, he discovered that birds that store seeds for the winter have remarkable spatial memory and an enlarged hippocampus –...