Charlotte Bronte (1816-1852) lived in the remote village of Haworth, Yorkshire. The daughter of a clergyman and sister of Emily Bronte (who wrote Wuthering Heights), her novels include Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. Jane Eyre, the most famous of these, has been adapted for stage, television and film many times. The most recent was a BBC adaptation in 2008. Over the years, the character of Jane Eyre has been played by Joan Fontaine, Susannah York, Sorcha Cusack, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Anna Paquin. A new version of Wuthering Heights, starring Tom Hardy, was televised on ITV1 in August 2009. (DVD available now.)

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was brought up in the town of Knutsford, near Manchester. She moved into the city of Manchester after her marriage to William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister. She was a contemporary of Charles Dickens and wrote for his magazine Household Words. She was also the friend and biographer of Charlotte Bronte.

Her novels include North and South, Mary Barton and Cranford. North and South is set in a fictionalised Manchester and was adapted for television by the BBC in 2004. Please use the link below for more comprehensive information:

The Gaskell Society

Born and brought up in Liverpool, Bainbridge (b.1932) was an actress in her early years and appeared in Coronation Street playing an anti-nuclear protester. Her 1989 novel, An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) was adapted into a film in 1995 starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant.

In the 1990s Bainbridge turned to historical fiction. Master Georgie, set in the Crimean War, won the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Her most recent novel, According to Queeney is a fictionalized account of the last years of the life of Samuel Johnson as seen through the eyes of Queeney Thrale and has received wide acclaim.

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in  Mytholmroyd Yorkshire. His best known poetry includes: The Hawk in the Rain, Crow, Tales from Ovid, and Birthday Letters, the poems written about his marriage to another poet, Sylvia Plath (who committed suide in 1963). Amongst his books for children are: Meet My Folks, The Iron Man and The Iron Woman

Simon Armitage was born in Marsden, West Yorkshire in 1963 and worked as a probation officer in Manchester before becoming a full-time poet and broadcaster. His collections include: Zoom, A Book Of Matches, and The Dead Sea Poems. He has also written All Points North, a collection of essays on the north of England.

Jane Rogers was born in London in 1952 but has lived most of her adult life in Mossley near Manchester. She is the author of several novels, including  Her Living Image , winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, The Ice is Singing and  Mr Wroe's Virgin's which was adapted for television in 1993 and directed by Danny Boyle. Promised Lands won the 1995 Writers' Guild Award. Her latest work of fiction is The Voyage Home (2004). Her work for radio includes adaptations of work by Thomas Hardy, E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, all for BBC Radio 4.

Born in a prosperous Yorkshire farming family, Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) went to Oxford where she met Vera Brittain, later to be the author of Testament of Youth, with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship. After graduation in 1921 they moved to London to establish themselves as writers. Holtby was also a prolific journalist and wrote for more than 20 newspapers and magazines, including the feminist journal Time and Tide and the Manchester Guardian newspaper. Her most important book was her last, South Riding. She was just 37 when she died. South Riding was published the following year and received high praise, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1936.

Vera Brittain subsequently wrote about her friendship with Holtby in her book Testament of Friendship (1940).

Hilary Mantel (b.1952) was was brought up in the Derbyshire mill village of Hadfield. In 1970 she went to the London School of Economics to read law but transferred to Sheffield University, graduating in 1973. Her novels include Fludd and  Beyond Black which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005. Her latest, Wolf Hall, based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, has just won the 2009 Booker Prize. She is also a critic and writes regularly for the London Review of Books.