27 British fantasy writers

Joe Abercrombie is a British fantasy writer and film editor. He is the author of The First Law trilogy, as well as other fantasy books in the same setting and a trilogy of young adult novels. His novel Half a King won the 2015 Locus Award for best Young Adult book.

Francis William Bain was a British writer of fantasy stories that he claimed were translated from Sanskrit.

John Scot Barrowman is a Scottish-American actor, singer, presenter, author, and comic book writer. Born in Glasgow, Barrowman moved to the U.S. with his family in 1975. Encouraged by his high school teachers, he studied performing arts at the United States International University in San Diego before landing the role of Billy Crocker in Cole Porter's Anything Goes in London's West End. Since his debut, he has played lead roles in various musicals both in the West End and on Broadway, including Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard, and Matador. After appearing in Sam Mendes' production of The Fix, he was nominated for the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical and, in the early 2000s, returned to the role of Billy Crocker in the revival of Anything Goes. His most recent West End credit was in the 2009 production of La Cage aux Folles.

Pauline Diana Baynes was an English illustrator, author and commercial artist. She contributed drawings and paintings to more than two hundred books, mostly in the children's genre. She was the first illustrator of some of J. R. R. Tolkien's minor works and of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.The hallmarks of her work were a talent for lively, imaginative designs; the ability to create a sense of energy and animation; a confident fluidity of line; a bold use of vibrant, gem-like colours and the subtle employment of negative space.

John Brophy was an Anglo-Irish soldier, journalist and author who wrote more than 40 books, mostly based on his experiences during World War I.

Georgia Byng is a British children's writer, illustrator, actress and film producer.

Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter pilot. His books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide.

Joseph Henry Delaney is a British author, known for his dark fantasy series Spook's.

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer and medical doctor. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction.

David Andrew Gemmell was a British author of heroic fantasy, best known for his debut novel, Legend. A former journalist and newspaper editor, Gemmell had his first work of fiction published in 1984. He went on to write over thirty novels. Gemmell's works display violence, yet also explore themes of honour, loyalty and redemption. There is always a strong heroic theme but nearly always the heroes are flawed in some way. With over one million copies sold, his work continues to sell worldwide.

James Brian Jacques was an English writer known for his Redwall series of novels and Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series. He also completed two collections of short stories entitled The Ribbajack & Other Curious Yarns and Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales.

Kate Johnson, also known as Cat Marsters, is a British author who writes in the Paranormal and Speculative Romantic Novel genres. She is the author of the award-winning novel Max Seventeen.

Roz Kaveney is a British writer, critic, and poet, best known for her critical works about pop culture and for being a core member of the Midnight Rose collective. Kaveney's works include fiction and non-fiction, poetry, reviewing, and editing.

Tanith Lee was a British science fiction and fantasy writer. She wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories, and was the winner of multiple World Fantasy Society Derleth Awards, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Horror. She also wrote a children's picture book, and many poems. Additionally, she wrote two episodes of the BBC science fiction series Blake's 7. She was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award best novel award, for her book Death's Master (1980).

Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books.

Geraldine McCaughrean is a British children's novelist. She has written more than 170 books, including Peter Pan in Scarlet (2004), the official sequel to Peter Pan commissioned by Great Ormond Street Hospital, the holder of Peter Pan's copyright. Her work has been translated into 44 languages worldwide. She has received the Carnegie Medal twice and the Michael L. Printz Award among others.

Lily Adams Beck, née Elizabeth Louisa Moresby was a British writer of short-stories, novels, biographies and esoteric books, under the names of L. Adams Beck, E. Barrington and Louis Moresby, and sometimes other variations: Lily Adams Beck, Elizabeth Louisa Beck, Eliza Louisa Moresby Beck and Lily Moresby Adams

Emma Newman is a British science fiction and fantasy writer, podcaster and audiobook narrator. Her award nominations include the British Fantasy Award for Between Two Thorns in 2014 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for After Atlas in 2017. Her Planetfall series was nominated for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Series.

Peter Newman is an English author of fantasy novels and short stories, including the Gemmell Award-winning The Vagrant. He is also co-writer of the Hugo Award winning Tea and Jeopardy podcast.

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist; his work, mostly in the fantasy genre, was published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than ninety books of his work were published in his lifetime, and both original work and compilations have continued to appear. Dunsany's œuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as plays, novels and essays. He achieved great fame and success with his early short stories and plays, and during the 1910s was considered one of the greatest living writers of the English-speaking world; he is today best known for his 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Gods of Pegāna, wherein he devised his own fictional pantheon and laid the groundwork for the fantasy genre. He was the inventor of an asymmetric version of chess called Dunsany's chess.

Sir Philip Pullman, CBE, FRSL is an English novelist. He is the author of several best-selling books, including the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Pullman was named the eleventh most influential person in British culture. He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for "services to literature".

Matthew Phipps Shiell, known as M. P. Shiel, was a British writer. His legal surname remained "Shiell" though he adopted the shorter version as a de facto pen name.

Jonathan Anthony Stroud is a British writer of fantasy fiction, mainly for children and young adults.

Adrian Czajkowski is a British fantasy and science fiction author. He is best known for his series Shadows of the Apt, and for his novel Children of Time.

Pamela Lyndon Travers was an Australian-English writer who spent most of her career in England. She is best known for the Mary Poppins series of children's books, which feature the magical nanny Mary Poppins.

Freda Warrington is a British author, known for her epic fantasy, vampire and supernatural novels. Four of her novels have been nominated for the British Fantasy Society's Best Novel award. Dracula the Undead won the Dracula Society's 1997 Children of the Night Award. Her novel, Elfland, won the Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award in the Fantasy Novel category for 2009. Warrington has also seen numerous short stories published in anthologies and magazines.