PHILIP HOARE

A writer, broadcaster and curator, Hoare has written biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noel Coward, and histories of Victorian religious mania and sexual perversity during WWI, but he’s best known for books on the sea. Leviathan, or The Whale won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009. RisingTideFallingStar was described by Robert Macfarlane as “rich and strange from the tip of its title to its deep-sunk bones”. He is professor of creative writing at the University of Southampton, and curator of the Moby-Dick Big Read. In “The Last Bohemian”, for Esquire, he writes about his former landlady in Cape Cod.