10. Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran is a broadcaster, TV critic and columnist at The Times. The eldest of eight children, she grew up in Wolverhampton and was educated at home from the age of 11. At 15, she won The Observer’s Young Reporter of the Year and the following year began her career as a journalist for the weekly music publication Melody Maker. Her first novel, The Chronicles of Narno, inspired by being part of a home-schooled family who she described as the “only hippies in Wolverhampton”, was published when she was 16.

Her book How to be a Woman became a best-seller in 2011. The 2012 follow up, Moranthology, was her first collection of her published interviews, reviews and columns. Her work to change tone of the debate around feminism has made it relevant to a new generation of teenagers and beyond. Fusing her writings with pop culture and raw humour, her best-seller arguably signalled the dawn of a new wave of feminism.

A prolific Twitter user, last August she organised a boycott of the site in protest against its perceived failure to deal adequately with offensive content posted on the Twitter feeds of public figures. She is touring the UK this summer to coincide with the release of her new book How to Build a Girl, which she has described as “the only novel so far in existence with an entire chapter about cystitis”.