Manchester Metropolitan University

Julie Walters, CBE , Staffordshire is an English actress and novelist. She came to international prominence in 1983 for Educating Rita, performing in... the title role opposite Michael Caine. It was a role she had created on the West End stage and it won her BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for Best Actress. She is best known internationally for her on-screen characterisation of Molly Weasley in seven of the eight Harry Potter films. In 2006, she came fourth in ITV's poll of the public's 50 Greatest Stars in the UK. She is also well known for her collaborations with Victoria Wood, such as appearing in and co-writing with her the award-winning sitcoms Victoria Wood As Seen On TV and Dinnerladies. Julia Mary Walters was born in Smethwick, West Midlands, very close to Birmingham, to parents Mary Bridget , a postal clerk of Irish Catholic extraction, and Thomas Walters, a builder and decorator.
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Stephen Hodder MBE is an English architect who won the RIBA's Stirling Prize in 1996. He is also a partner at his own practice Hodder Associates... which was founded in 1992. Hodder graduated from Manchester University in 1982 and joined BDP but left after a year and set his own firm up after he was offered a project by a family member. One of his first jobs came after he won a competition to build Lytham St Annes Station. He joined the teaching staff at the Manchester School of Architecture. In 2011 he chairs the Professional Advisory Board at the School. Hodder won the Royal Fine Art Commission/Sunday Times Building of the Year Award for his design of Colne Swimming pool in Lancashire in the first year that his practice opened. In 1995, Hodder Associates won the Grand Prize at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition and in 1996 he was awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize for the Centenary Building, University of Salford. Hodder was appointed Member of the British Empire in 1998 for services to architecture.
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Sir Antony Sher, KBE is a double Olivier Award winning South African-born British actor, writer, theatre director and painter. Sher was born into a... Lithuanian Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of Margery and Emmanuel Sher, who worked in business. He grew up in the suburb of Sea Point and is a cousin of the playwright Ronald Harwood. Sher, however, has worked mainly in the United Kingdom and is now a British citizen. In 1968, after completing his compulsory military service, he left for London to audition at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but was unsuccessful. Instead, he studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art from 1969 to 1971. After training, and some early performances with the theatre group Gay Sweatshop, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982. In the 1970s Sher was part of an astonishing group of young actors and writers working at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. It consisted of the likes of writers Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale and fellow actors Bernard Hill, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve and Jonathan Pryce.
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Gwendoline Riley is an English writer, born in 1979. Born in London, she attended Manchester Metropolitan University. Her first book, Cold Water, was... named one of the five outstanding debut novels of 2002 by The Guardian 'Weekend' magazine and also won a Betty Trask Award. Sick Notes followed in 2004 and Joshua Spassky in 2007. For Cold Water and Sick Notes, the drama unfolds in Manchester, occasionally extending to different areas of Lancashire. Joshua Spassky, however, is set in Asheville, North Carolina - the town where Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at the Highland Hospital. Joshua Spassky won the 2008 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Riley was also a recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2011. Her fourth novel, Opposed Positions, was published in May 2012.
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