Since our inception, we have assessed applications ‘in house’ but these have now become so numerous that we are introducing a new system. All applications must be made on our Application form, downloaded from ‘How to Apply’. Writers’ applications will be assessed twice a year on our behalf by Maggie Gee and her husband, Nick Rankin, and artists’ applications will be similarly assessed by Louise Campbell. These three selectors are well-known to us and have supported HHT for many years.
Maggie Gee is a novelist, critic and short story writer who has published seventeen books, including a collection of short fiction, The Blue. Her most recent novel was The Red Children (2022), inspired by her interest in Neanderthals and partly written in the Hosking Houses Trust cottage. Other novels include Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014) and the pioneering climate change fictions Where Are the Snows (1990), The Ice People (1997), and The Flood (2004). Her novel The White Family (2002), about British racism and the erosion of public space, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and the International Dublin Impac Award. Maggie has been translated into over 15 languages. In 2012 there was an international conference about her writing at St Andrew’s University. She has given lectures and readings around the world, including Kampala, Geneva, Ankara, Istanbul, Stockholm, Rostov, Beirut, Cairo, and Tripoli. She is a Vice-President of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature, where she was the first woman Chair of Council, and on the Board of ALCS. She loves reading.
Nicholas Rankin was a BBC World Service broadcaster and programme-maker for twenty years, winning two UN awards and becoming Chief Producer. His six non-fiction books, all published by Faber, include biographies of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson and the war correspondent George Steer; Churchill’s Wizards, a study of camouflage, deception and black propaganda in both world wars; Ian Fleming’s Commandos, the story of a British naval intelligence unit; Defending the Rock, about Gibraltar in the Second World War; and most recently a memoir of colonial East Africa, Trapped in History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me. He is a Life Member of the National Union of Journalists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is on the board of the writers’ and illustrators’ trade union, the Society of Authors. Nick has been married to the novelist Maggie Gee for over forty years and they live in Ramsgate, Kent.
Assessors for residencies: Louise Campbell
Artists and those whose work is primarily visual are selected by Professor Louise Campbell. She is Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Warwick where she taught in the art history department for many years before her retirement in 2014. She trained at art college before specialising in art history at Sussex University and the Courtauld Institute.
She has published widely on modern architecture and especially the architecture of modern Coventry and the Cathedral designed by Basil Spence; Coventry Cathedral: art and architecture in post-war Britain, OUP 1996, and on public art in the post-war period. Her interest in how artists shape and are in turn are shaped by their surroundings is explored in her most recent book, Studio lives: architect, art and artist in twentieth century Britain (Lund Humphries, 2019).
Louise was a trustee of HHT from 2012-21 and has remained a staunch supporter as an Honorary Fellow, contributing to HHT expansion and success.