Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Alan Graham MacDiarmid ONZ was a chemist, and one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000. He was born in Masterton, New... Zealand as one of five children – three brothers and two sisters. His family was relatively poor, and the Great Depression made life difficult in Masterton, due to which his family shifted to Lower Hutt, a few miles from Wellington, New Zealand. At around age ten, he developed an interest in chemistry from one of his father's old textbooks, and he taught himself from this book and from library books. He was educated at Hutt Valley High School and Victoria University of Wellington. In 1943, MacDiarmid passed the University of New Zealand's University Entrance Exam and its Medical Preliminary Exam. He then took up a part-time job as a "lab boy" or janitor in Victoria University of Wellington, during his studies for a BSc degree, which he completed in 1947. He was then appointed demonstrator in the undergraduate laboratories. After completing an MSc in chemistry from the same university, he later worked as an assistant in its chemistry department.
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Alan Bennett is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. Born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Oxford University where... he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968. His output includes The Madness of George III and its film incarnation The Madness of King George, the series of monologues Talking Heads, the play The History Boys, and popular audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire.
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John Philip Madden is an English director of theatre, film, television, and radio. Madden was educated at Clifton College. He was in the same house... as friend and fellow director Roger Michell. He began his career in British independent films, and graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1970 with a B.A. in English literature. He started work in television including directing Prime Suspect 4 and episodes of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Morse. Perhaps his most notable achievement to date was directing Shakespeare in Love, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1998, and for which he was also nominated as Best Director; he lost to Steven Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan. The film also won the Silver Bear at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival. Madden is also a Jury Member for the digital studio Filmaka, a platform for undiscovered filmmakers to show their work to industry professionals. Plays he has directed include Arthur Kopit's Wings. Radio dramas he has directed include the radio versions of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.
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Nicholas "Nick" Laird is a novelist and poet who was born, and grew up, in Cookstown, County Tyrone. He studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,... where he attained a first in English. He went on to work at the global law firm Allen & Overy in London for six years, before leaving to concentrate on his writing. Since 2004, he has been married to novelist Zadie Smith, whom he met while at Cambridge, and as of 2009, they have a daughter, Katherine.He participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six, with a piece he wrote based upon a chapter of the King James Bible In a January 2006 appearance on The Leonard Lopate Show, Laird explained how travelling out of Northern Ireland for an education in Cambridge had expanded his horizons and opened him up to opportunities that he believes would have otherwise been closed to him: "I met a Jewish person for the first time. I met a black person for the first time." He also described the freedom that moving away from Northern Ireland gave him with respect to adopting a new, or broader, identity. "It does mean freedom in a way to reinvent.
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