The latest update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is published on Thursday 9 April 2026 and adds biographies of 229 people who left their mark on the UK, and who died in the year 2022.
Avtar Singh Jouhl
Punjabi-born Avtar Singh Jouhl (1937-2022) moved to England in 1958, settling in Smethwick. Confronted by overt discrimination while working at Shotton Brothers foundry, he became a trade unionist and from 1961 general secretary of the Indian Workers’ Association. He was active in campaigns against workplace discrimination, as well as in broader anti-racist activism (including around the notorious 1964 general election in Smethwick, after which he invited Malcolm X to Smethwick, to drink in a segregated pub). Later he founded the Shaheed Udham Singh Welfare Centre on Soho Road, Birmingham, and taught trade union rights at South Birmingham College.
Jill Knight
Jill Knight, Baroness Knight of Collingtree (1923-2022), was Conservative MP for Birmingham Edgbaston from 1966 to 1997; a traditionalist, she was perhaps most famous as one of the sponsors of the Section 28 amendment to the 1988 Local Government Act which barred schools and local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality.
Jack Dromey
Jack Dromey (1948-2022) was a trade unionist and deputy general secretary of Unite before becoming Labour MP for Birmingham Erdington in 2010, joining his wife Harriet Harman as a shadow minister.
Also included in the new edition:
· Born in Handsworth and educated at the Birmingham College of Domestic Science, Joyce Molyneux (1931-2022) worked under Douglas Sutherland at the Mulberry Tree in Stratford upon Avon then George Perry-Smith at the Hole in the Wall in Bath before starting her own restaurant, the Carved Angel in Dartmouth, which became a magnet for gastronomes; she was one of the first women chefs to be awarded a Michelin star.
· Brought up in Birmingham and educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls, Katherine Duncan-Jones (1941-2022) was a biographer of Sir Philip Sidney and a leading Shakespeare scholar.
· Born in Stourbridge and also educated at King Edward IV High School for Girls, Kathleen Booth (1922-2022) was a pioneering computer scientist who with her colleague Xenia Sweeting built, for the British Rubber Producers Research Association, the world’s first stored-program computer, the ARC. She later wrote a pioneering textbook, Programming for an Automatic Digital Computer (1958).
· Born in Aldridge, Staffordshire, and educated at Erdington Grammar School for Girls, Anthea Millett (1941-2022) joined Her Majesty’s Inspectorate in 1978, taking responsibility for assessment and examinations, before becoming director of inspections at Ofsted in 1992 and first chief executive of the Teacher Training Agency in 1995.
· By the end of his long life, Handsworth-born and Handsworth Grammar School-educated Sir David Cox (1924-2022) had become acclaimed as the greatest statistician of his time, having made ground-breaking contributions to almost all areas of applied probability and statistics, as well as to applications in many branches of science; among many honours he was awarded the inaugural international prize for statistics by the World Statistics Congress.
Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) was the longest-reigning monarch in British history. During the course of her reign, the United Kingdom ceased to be a great power in the world, and changed in many other ways. To all this she adapted, slowly and not always enthusiastically, but on the whole wisely and well.
Other prominent figures in the new edition include politician and inaugural first minister of Northern Ireland David Trimble, Baron Trimble (1944-2022); peace campaigner Bruce Kent (1929-2022);authors Dame Hilary Mantel (1952-2022), Jack Higgins (1929-2022), and Raymond Briggs (1934-2022); inventor of the Jump Jet Ralph Hooper (1926-2022); fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood (1941-2022); artist Dame Paula Rego (1935-2022); theatre director Peter Brook (1925-2022); actors Dame Angela Lansbury (1925-2022) and Robbie Coltrane (1950-2022); singer Dame Olivia Newton-John (1948-2022); jockey Lester Piggott (1935-2022); and 1966 World Cup winner George Cohen (1939-2022).
A full list of new subjects is available from the dictionary.
The Oxford DNB is the national record of people who have shaped British history, worldwide, from prehistory to the year 2022. From April 2026 the dictionary includes biographies of more than 63,000 individuals, written by over 14,000 contributors, and with more than 12,000 portrait images.