Modern British literature continues a tradition that runs from Shakespeare and Dickens through Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (born in Japan, raised in Surrey) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017; Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice for her novels about Thomas Cromwell. JK Rowling's Harry Potter series, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997, is the best-selling book series in history.
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Britain has produced fifteen Nobel laureates in Literature including Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, William Golding, Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing and Kazuo Ishiguro. Poet Laureates of recent decades include Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion and the current laureate, Simon Armitage.
You may be asked who wrote the Harry Potter books (JK Rowling), or which UK award is given for fiction (the Booker Prize).
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