The second of two companion volumes, this title is arranged alphabetically and comprises some 700 entries containing information about writers from Peter Ackroyd to Benjamin Zephaniah. Each entry gives biographical summaries of the life and work of the most prominent novelists, poets and dramatists of the 20th-century writing in English. The biographies are deliberately anecdotal, even gossipy, and the book is unusual in containing complete, rather than selected, bibliographies.