Wadham College, Oxford

Michael Wayne Rosen is a broadcaster, children's novelist and poet and the author of 140 books. He was appointed as the fifth Children's Laureate in... June 2007, succeeding Jacqueline Wilson, and held this honour until 2009. Michael Rosen was born in Harrow, London. The family background is Jewish, "from the Jewish East End tradition" as Rosen puts it. Rosen's father Harold was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, in the United States to Communist parents and settled in the East End of London at the age of two, when his mother returned to the country of her birth. While a member of the Young Communist League he met Connie Isakofsky, his future wife and Michael Rosen's mother, in 1935. Harold was a secondary school teacher before becoming a professor of English at the Institute of Education, London, and Connie a primary school teacher before becoming a training college lecturer; she also broadcast for the BBC. Producing a programme featuring poetry, she persuaded her son to write for it, and used some of the material he submitted. Their ancestors came from Poland, Russia and Romania.
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Monica Ali is a British writer and novelist of Bangladeshi origin. She is the author of Brick Lane, her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the... Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003. Ali was voted Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists on the basis of the unpublished manuscript. Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh to a Bangladeshi father and English mother, moving to Bolton, England at the age of three, where she was raised. Her father is originally from the district of Mymensingh. She went to Bolton School and then studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Ali opposes the British government’s attempt to introduce the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, something she writes about in her contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays published by Penguin in November 2005.
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Felicity Jones is an actress.

Patrick Albert Crispin Marber is an English comedian, playwright, director, puppeteer, actor and screenwriter. Marber was born in London, England,... the son of Brian Marber, a leading and highly-regarded technical analyst, and was raised in Wimbledon. He was educated at St Paul's School, Cranleigh School and Wadham College, Oxford. After working for a few years as a stand-up comedian, Marber was a writer and cast member on the radio shows On the Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You, and their television spinoffs The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. Amongst other roles, Marber portrayed the hapless reporter Peter O'Hanrahahanrahan in both On the Hour and The Day Today, and was involved in a dispute with the comedians Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, who had written for On the Hour, about who had invented the character. Lee and Herring's TV show Fist of Fun would later make several references to their ongoing feud with Marber, calling him a "Cornish playwright" and "Cornish curmudgeon". In Stewart Lee's 2010 book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Marber is referred to as a "new Shakespeare".
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