Context: The Big Read was a survey on books carried out by the BBC in the United Kingdom in 2003, where over three quarters of a million votes were received from the British public to find the nation's best-loved novel of all time. The year-long survey was the biggest single test of public reading taste to date, and culminated with several programmes hosted by celebrities, advocating their favourite books., Stella Dorothea Gibbons ( 5 January 1902 -- 19 December 1989 ) was an English author , journalist , and poet . She established her reputation with her first novel , Cold Comfort Farm ( 1932 ) , which won the literary Prix Femina Étranger and has been reprinted many times . Although she was active as a writer for half a century , none of her later 22 novels or other literary works -- which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm -- achieved the same critical or popular success . Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century . The daughter of a London doctor , Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood . After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist , and worked as a reporter and features writer , mainly for the Evening Standard and The Lady . Her first book , published in 1930 , was a collection of poems which was well received , and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist . After Cold Comfort Farm , a satire on the genre of rural - themed `` loam and lovechild '' novels popular in the late 1920s , most of Gibbons 's novels were based within the middle - class suburban world with which she was familiar . Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950 . Her style has been praised by critics for its charm , barbed humour and descriptive skill , and has led to comparison with Jane Austen . The impact of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her career , and she grew to resent her identification with the book to the exclusion of the rest of her output . Widely regarded as a one - work novelist , she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature -- partly , other writers have suggested , because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it ., Mary E. Mann, née Rackham, (14 August 1848  19 May 1929) was an English writer of novels and short stories, primarily on themes of poverty and rural English life., The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. It is headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation, and is the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, with over 20,950 staff in total, of whom 16,672 are in public sector broadcasting; including part-time, flexible as well as fixed contract staff, the total number is 35,402., Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb. Gibbons was working for the "Evening Standard "in 1928 when they decided to serialise Webb's first novel, "The Golden Arrow", and Gibbons was given the job of summarising the plot of earlier instalments. Other novelists in the tradition parodied by "Cold Comfort Farm" are D. H. Lawrence, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Thomas Hardy; and going further back, Mary E. Mann and the Brontë sisters. "Cold Comfort Farm" won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 88 on the BBC's survey The Big Read., Sheila Kaye-Smith (4 February 1887  14 January 1956) was an English writer, known for her many novels set in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent in the English regional tradition. Her 1923 book "The End of the House of Alard" became a best-seller, and gave her prominence; it was followed by other successes and her books enjoyed worldwide sales., Mary Gladys Webb (25 March 1881  8 October 1927) was an English romantic novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly in the Shropshire countryside and among Shropshire characters and people which she knew. Her novels have been successfully dramatized, most notably the film "Gone to Earth" in 1950 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. They inspired the famous parody "Cold Comfort Farm"., Subject: stella gibbons, Relation: country_of_citizenship, Options: (A) british (B) earth (C) london (D) united kingdom (E) writer
Output: united kingdom