Giles Coren and Sue Perkins

Giles Coren

Writer and Broadcaster Giles Coren has been the Times columnist and food critic since 1999 and was named Food and Drink Writer of the Year in 2005 at the British Press Awards.

Television work has included appearing on Gordon Ramsay’s The F-Word and co-presenting The Supersizers Eat…with Sue Perkins where they experienced food through the ages, including Elizabethan and Wartime cuisine. They also co-presented Giles and Sue Live the Good Life, based on the television series starring Richard Briers.

He has said of his partner Sue that: "Take Sue Perkins: Cambridge girl, funniest person I’ve ever met. But has she got a Cambridge comedy partner? No. She is stuck having to work with me, the unfunniest man on TV."

Giles published his first novel, Winkler in 2005, which won that year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. In 2010 came his second book: Anger Management for Beginners, which deals with all the things that make him mad.

His late father was Alan Coren, the former editor of Punch magazine and Call My Bluff presenter and his sister is journalist and professional poker player Victoria Coren.

Giles studied English at Oxford and is married with one daughter.

The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee (1969)

Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

This was Giles' most highly recommended book.

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (2002)

Asterix in Britain by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (1965)

Sue Perkins

Sue Perkins grew up in Croydon before heading to Cambridge University in 1988, graduating with a degree in English Literature.

It was at Cambridge where Sue first met her comedy partner Mel Giedroyc. In 1993 they performed at the Edinburgh Festival where they were shortlisted for a newcomer award. They went on to become a formidable double act on TV.

She has performed her own stand-up shows at the Edinburgh festival and has toured extensively to sell-out crowds.

As well as appearing on our screen with Giles in The Supersizers series’ and The Good Life, she has written for French and Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous and a number of radio series. In 2008 she won the BBC’s TV conductor competition Maestro going on to conduct the full BBC Concert Orchestra in front of an audience of 35,000 at Proms in the Park that same year.

As a solo performer, she presented three series of the Sky film show, Movie Babylon, and two series of Good Evening Rockall for BBC THREE.

She is a regular contributor to The Culture Show, Have I Got News For You, Never Mind the Full Stops and many other programmes across both Radio and TV. In 2009 Sue was a judge on the Man Booker Prize.

In 2010 she was reunited with Mel in The Great British Bake Off for the BBC and fronted A Band for Britain where she helped the English town of Dinnington to breathe new life into their colliery brass band.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (1969)

Sue hedged her bets and chose this as her first recommendation...

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

Sue picked this as her second recommendation

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter (1984)

The Queen of Whale Cay by Kate Summerscale (1997)

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)