Graham Swift

Swift was born in south London in 1949, read English at Cambridge, and taught part-time for a decade while learning his trade in stories. Waterland (1983), eels, madness, and the flat, flooded Fens, narrated by a history teacher who can only explain his life by telling stories, became an instant contemporary classic and fixed his method: confession circling a withheld event.

Last Orders (1996) rotates among the voices of Jack Dodds's old friends and adoptive son as they carry his ashes to the sea, pub-plain talk opening into war memories, betrayals, and unsaid love; it won the Booker, surviving a brief press squall over its openly Faulknerian architecture.

Mothering Sunday (2016), a maid's one transformative day in 1924, distilled the career: small lives, immense hinterlands.