British · b. 1951
Carol Birch earned a 2011 Booker Prize shortlisting for "Jamrach's Menagerie," a novel about a Victorian boy who survives a tiger attack and ships out to catch a dragon. The British author has published more than a dozen novels, often set in the past and centered on outsiders and wanderers. Birch writes historical fiction without nostalgia, finding in earlier centuries the same chaos and cruelty that define the present.