Authors A-Z

Esther W.

Esther W. spent much of her childhood growing up on South Ronaldsay in Orkney, where her father was convicted of physical and sexual abuse. Today, Esther has a BA in Design and lives in the West Midlands. Her website and blog is survivormum.com, where she charts the day to day demands of being a mother to two wonderful and very active boys while breaking the chains of her past.

WWF

WWF is one of the world’s largest independent conservation organisations, with more than five million supporters worldwide, working in nearly 100 countries, supporting around 1,300 conservation and environmental projects. WWF-UK is part of WWF and is a registered charity in England and Wales (1081247) and in Scotland (SC039593) and a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (4016725). More information about WWF can be found at wwf.org.uk, @wwf_uk and on Facebook

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of the leading writers and scholars at work in the world today. His books include the novels Petals of Blood, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977, A Grain of Wheat and Wizard of the Crow; the memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of the Interpreter and Birth of a Dream Weaver; and the essays, Decolonizing the Mind, Something Torn and New and Globalectics. Recipient of many honours, among them ten honorary doctorates, he is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Kit de Waal

Kit de Waal, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father, was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the 60's and 70's. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. Kit was named the FutureBook Person of the Year in 2019.

Watts Wacker

Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker are futurists and principles of FirstMatter, a trend-watching consulting firm. The co-author of the bestselling The Myth of Excellence, Mathews has been profiled in Fast Company and Wired. Watts Wacker has been profiled in Fast Company and Forbes, and was called "one of the 50 smartest people in the business world" by The Financial Times. He is the co-author of The 500-Year Delta and The Visionary's Handbook.

Martin Waddell

Martin Waddell is one of the finest contemporary children's book writers. Winner of the Smarties Book Prize - for Farmer Duck and Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? - he also won the Kurt Maschler Award for The Park in the Dark and the Best Book For Babies Award for Rosie's Babies. He was the Irish nominee for the 2000 Hans Christian Andersen Award. He lives with his wife Rosaleen in County Down, Northern Ireland. Susan Varley is a prize-winning artist who has illustrated many books for Andersen Press. Her best-selling picture book Badger's Parting Gifts is one of the most enduring of all time, winning many prizes, including the Mother Goose Award.

Sid Waddell

Sid Waddell, 'The Geordie Lip', the Moses of the game, was born in Northumberland in 1940. He grew up in a former pit village near Newcastle, the son of a miner. He graduated with a degree in History from Cambridge University, then started out as a TV producer working on Indoor League in the early 1970s. This led to him receiving the back-handed compliment of being asked to be the BBC's lead commentator on all their major BDO televised darts tournaments. He worked for them in this capacity from 1978 to 1993 during which time he also penned the highly successful children's television series Jossy's Giants. Since 1993 he has worked for Sky Television and commentates on all major PDC televised darts tournaments.

Dan Waddell

Dan Waddell is a journalist and author who lives in London. He has written more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction, including the bestselling guide which accompanied the first series of Who Do You Think You Are? He has also written an award-winning series of crime novels featuring genealogist Nigel Barnes.

Paul Waddington

Paul Waddington is the author of Seasonal Food and Shades of Green. He is also a newspaper columnist and professional writer. He takes a deep interest in food and environmental issues and grows vegetables, keeps bees and lives as sustainably as possible in Yorkshire.

Martyn Wade

Born in Liverpool, Elisabeth Sladen trained at drama school before joining the Liverpool Playhouse, first as an assistant stage manager and then as an actor. Weekly touring rep, radio and television followed, with early roles in Coronation Street, Z-Cars, Doomwatch and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, and she worked for two seasons with Alan Ayckbourn's company in Scarborough. She joined Doctor Who in 1973, playing the independently-minded journalist Sarah Jane Smith, and quickly became one of the series' most popular companions. On leaving the programme in 1977, Elisabeth made a return to theatre before appearing in the sitcom Take My Wife and the BBC classic serials Gulliver in Lilliput and Alice in Wonderland; she also presented the children's series Stepping Stones. She reprised the role of Sarah Jane a number of times, on television in K9 and Company and The Five Doctors, and on BBC Radio in The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space. In 2006 Elisabeth returned as Sarah Jane for the BBC One Doctor Who episode 'School Reunion'. This led to the spin-off programme The Sarah Jane Adventures, of which five series were broadcast from 2007 to 2011. Elisabeth Sladen died in 2011, aged 63. Nicholas Courtney was born in Egypt, the son of a diplomat. He grew up in a variety of countries, including Kenya and France, and at the age of eighteen was called up for National Service. Following this he entered the Webber Douglas drama school and trained to be an actor. A stint in repertory theatre was followed by early television roles in programmes including Sword of Honour and Watch the Birdies. His first association with Doctor Who came with the 1965 story The Daleks' Master Plan, in which he played Bret Vyon. In 1967 he returned to the series, making the first of many semi-regular appearances as Colonel (later Brigadier) Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. He also appeared on radio alongside Elisabeth Sladen in The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space. His other television appearances included Minder, Juliet Bravo, All Creatures Great and Small and Sink or Swim; whilst on stage he appeared in numerous productions including The Dame of Sark, The Rocky Horror Show and The Mousetrap. He also released an autobiography, Five Rounds Rapid! in 1998 and recorded his memoirs (subtitled A Soldier in Time) for a 2002 Big Finish audio CD. Nicholas Courtney died in 2011, aged 81.

Lea Wade

Kay Woodward (Author) Kay Woodward has written over a hundred books for children. She lives somewhere very hot with her husband and her daughter, who loves her Hatchimal!

Lucy Wadham

Lucy Wadham was born in London and has lived in France for the past twenty years. She is the author of Lost, shortlisted for the Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction. Her most recent book is The Secret Life of France.

Peter Wadhams

Peter Wadhams is the UK's most experienced sea ice scientist. He was Director of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge from 1987 to 1992 and Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge from 1992 to 2015. He has made more than 50 expeditions to both polar regions, working from ice camps, icebreakers, aircraft, and, uniquely, Royal Navy submarines (making six submerged voyages to the North Pole). His research group in Cambridge has been the only UK group with the capacity to carry out field work on sea ice. He has also held visiting professorships at the National Institute of Polar Research, Tokyo, the US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, the University of Washington, Seattle and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla. Peter Wadhams has been awarded the W.S. Bruce Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1977), the UK Polar Medal (1987) and the Italgas Prize for Environmental Sciences (1990). He is an Associate Professor at the Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche, and a Professor at the Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Member of the Finnish Academy.

Meredith Wadman

Meredith Wadman, MD, has a long profile as a medical reporter and has covered biomedical research politics from Washington, DC, for twenty years. She has written for Nature, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Stanford University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she began medical school at the University of British Columbia and completed medical school as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. She is an Editorial Fellow at New America, a DC think tank.

Philip Waechter

Philip Waechter was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1968 and studied Communications Design in Mainz, majoring in Illustration. He still lives in Frankfurt and works as a freelance graphic artist and is a founder member of the illustrators' group, Labor. He has illustrated numerous picture books in Germany. This is Philip's first book for Hutchinson.

Jan Costin Wagner

JAN COSTIN WAGNER was born in 1972 in Langen/Hesse near Frankfurt. After studying German language, literature and history at Frankfurt University, he went on to work as a journalist and freelance writer. He divides his time between Germany and Finland (the home country of his wife). His first crime novel featuring Detective Kimmo Joentaa was Ice Moon (2006) and Silence (2010) is the second in the series. Silence won the 2008 German Crime Prize.

Robert Wagner

Robert J. Wagner has been active in Hollywood for more than five decades and has starred in such films as A Kiss Before Dying, The Longest Day, The Pink Panther and, most recently, the Austin Powers movies. On television, Wagner also starred in three long-running series, It Takes a Thief (with Fred Astaire), Switch (with Eddie Albert and Sharon Gless) and Hart to Hart (with Stefanie Powers). He is currently featured on Two and a Half Men. Wagner is married to actress Jill St. John and lives in Los Angeles.

Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner (1813-83) redefined opera and had an overwhelming impact on German and Western culture. His major works include Lohengrin, Tannhauser, Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal and the four parts of The Ring of the Nibelung: The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods.

Mirza Waheed

Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir. He moved to Delhi when he was eighteen to study English Literature at the University of Delhi and worked as a journalist in the city for four years. He came to London in 2001 to join the BBC's Urdu Service, where he now works as an editor. Waheed attended the Arvon Foundation in 2007. The Collaborator is his first novel.

Terry Wahls

Terry Wahls, PhD, is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City. She has made it her mission to spread the word about the Wahls Protocol through the book, her lectures, her website and Food as Medicine classes. She lives in Iowa City with her wife and daughter. Her son, Zach Wahls, is the author of the New York Times bestseller My Two Moms.

Per Wahlöö

Born in 1926, Per Wahlöö was a Swedish writer and journalist who, alongside his own novels, collaborated with his wife, Maj Sjöwall, on the bestselling Martin Beck crime series which are credited as inspiring writers as varied as Agatha Christie, Henning Mankell and Jonathan Franzen. In 1971 the fourth novel in the series, The Laughing Policeman, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Per Wahlöö died in 1975.

Tom Wainwright

Tom Wainwright is the Britain editor of The Economist. Until 2013 he was the newspaper’s Mexico City correspondent, covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, as well as parts of South America and the United States border region. Before moving to Mexico in early 2010 he covered crime and social affairs for the Britain section of The Economist. He has a first-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University.

Sally Wainwright

Sally Wainwright (Author) Sally Wainwright is a BAFTA award-winning writer and director. Her shows include Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax, To Walk Invisible, Scott & Bailey and At Home with the Braithwaites. Anne Choma (Author) Anne Choma is a writer and historical researcher, specialising in the life and times of Anne Lister. She lives in Yorkshire.

Martin Wainwright

Martin Wainwright (no relation) is the Guardian's highly respected Northern correspondent. He has edited two books about the British countryside, A Life of Mountains and A Gleaming Landscape.