Marina Benjamin's books include the memoirs Last Days in Babylon (longlisted for the Wingate Prize), The Middlepause (finalist for the Art Foundation's Creative Non-fiction Award) and Insomnia. Her essays have appeared in Granta, Aeon and the Paris Review and her journalism is published in Prospect, The Guardian, The New Statesman and  New York Times. Her latest memoir A Little Give completes her midlife trilogy.

Website: Marina-benjamin.com

Social Media @Marinab52 [Twitter] @Marinabenjamin.bsky.social

Tim has been a science junky from a young age, and for as long as he can remember has wanted to understand how things worked. On seeing the sea for the first time as a toddler, he stared at the waves for a while before asking his parents ‘why do they go and up and down’. His teachers at Barton C of E Primary School, Comberton Village College, and then Hills Road Sixth College – all state schools in Cambridgeshire – encouraged his love of science. After completing his A-levels, Tim spent a year teaching in rural Zimbabwe with the organisation Project Trust, before returning to the UK to study Biology at the University of York. He went on to be awarded a doctorate from Imperial College London in 1994, before working for the Zoological Society of London, the University of Cambridge, Imperial College and then, from 2013, the University of Oxford where he is Professor of Biology, joint head of the Department of Biology, and a professorial fellow of Jesus College.

Tim’s first book, “A Universal History of Me: What Had to Happen Since the Big Bang for You to Exist” summarises what he has learned about how the universe works. It covers topics from particle physics to cosmology, evolution of the genetic code to the rise of civilisations, and the formation of our solar system to the emergence of consciousness, while examining if our existence was inevitable at the birth of the universe or whether we are just incredibly lucky.

Tim’s research investigates the ecological and evolutionary consequences of altering predator population sizes on natural ecosystems, and this will be the focus of his next book. He uses a mix of mathematical models, observations of animals in their natural environments, and experiments in the laboratory. He’ll keep the equations out of the book in the hope it will be widely read.

Tim lives with his wife, Sonya, and dog Woofler, in Oxford. His three grown up children regularly visit, despite Tim’s experimental approach to cooking. He continues to optimistically believe he can combine the most incompatible ingredients to make an edible meal. Usually he can’t but there is very little food waste.

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/oue2d/home (still under construction...)

Bradley Garrett is a cultural geographer, explorer, and photographer. He is the author of five books translated into four languages and over fifty journal articles and book chapters. He has also written for The Atlantic, the Guardian, Vox, and GQ, and his research has been featured on media outlets worldwide including the The Joe Rogan Experience, National Geographic, 60 Minutes, and in a wide-range of BBC programmes.

More about Brad’s work can be found on his website www.bradleygarrett.com and he in on most social media channels @goblinmerchant 

Ferdia Lennon was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Libyan father. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. His short stories have appeared in publications such as the Irish Times and the Stinging Fly. In 2019 and 2021, he received Literature Bursary Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son. Glorious Exploits is his debut novel.

Website link: https://www.ferdialennon.com/

Instagram link: https://www.instagram.com/ferdialennon/

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese British novelist, memoirist and filmmaker. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her recent novel A Lover’s Discourse, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020 and longlisted for the Orwell Prize. Radical, A Life of My Own is published by Vintage and Grove in 2023. My Battle of Hastings will be published by Chatto, 2024. Named as a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist in 2013, she also directed a dozen films, including How Is Your Fish Today (Sundance Official Selection) and UFO In Her Eyes (TIFF). Her feature She, A Chinese received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Festival 2009. Her documentary We Went to Wonderland was in the Official Selection of ND/NF at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Once Upon A Time Proletarian was selected for the Horizon Section at Venice Film Festival 2009. She had her film retrospectives at London’s Whitechapel Gallery 2019 and Cinematheque Switzerland 2011, as we as at the Greek Film Archive in Athens 2018. She was a visiting professor at Columbia University and Baruch College in New York. Guo is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Andrew Harding is an author and foreign correspondent who has spent the past three decades living and working in Africa, Asia, and the former Soviet Union. His books and his reporting for BBC News – often focused on conflict zones, including Ukraine - have won him international recognition including a US Emmy and South Africa’s top literary prize.

Andrew has written three acclaimed non-fiction novels. The Mayor of Mogadishu (2016) told the story of a charismatic brawler who fled Somalia’s civil war for the UK, only to return years later to try to build peace in the ruins of Somalia’s capital. His next book, These Are Not Gentle People, tracked an explosive double murder case in a South African farming community wracked by poverty and racial tensions. His latest book, A Small, Stubborn Town, focuses on a little-known battle that helped change the course of the war in Ukraine, capturing the drama through the lives of a handful of local volunteers.

After fifteen years living in South Africa, Andrew recently moved to France as the BBC’s Paris correspondent. He is married and has three grown-up sons.

Author’s website: www.andrew-harding.com and twitter is @AndrewWJHarding

Rebecca Stott iis an award-winning writer, historian and broadcaster. Her novels include Ghostwalk (a New York Times bestseller), The Coral Thief (BBC Book at Bedtime) and most recently Dark Earth, a historical thriller set in the sixth century in the ruined city of Londinium. Her memoir In the Days of Rain, an account of growing up in - and escaping - a fundamentalist Christian cult, was awarded the Costa Biography Prize in 2017. Her other non-fiction books include two books on Darwin: Darwin and the Barnacle and Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists as well as a cultural history of the oyster, called Oyster. She taught on the acclaimed creative writing course at UEA for fourteen years - until 2021 - and although she has now given up teaching to spend more time writing, she still does a little mentoring. She has just finished co-writing the screenplay of In the Days of Rain and co-creatiing a new television series on Boudicca and has begun a new novel. She lives in Lewes, Sussex.

Benjamin Teitelbaum is an author, professor, speaker, and musician. Based at the University of Colorado Boulder, he has also been a scholar in residence at the University of Campinas, Brazil, and Karlstad University in Sweden. He is interested in political radicalism, the extreme right, intellectual history, esotericism, and expressive culture. 

Author’s website: benjaminteitelbaum.com

Dr Leor Zmigrod is a prize-winning scientist whose research has pioneered the new field of ‘political neuroscience’. She completed her BA and PhD at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar and won a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge to develop an independent research program into the cognitive roots of ideological convictions. Dr Zmigrod has held visiting fellowships at Stanford University, Harvard University, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and at the Paris Institute of Advanced Study as the Gretty Mirdal Junior Chair in “Brain, Culture, and Society”. She was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science and won the United Kingdom’s Women of the Future Science Award. Dr Zmigrod also received the Cognitive Science Glushko Prize, the 2020 ESCAN Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, a Distinguished Junior Scholar Award by the American Political Science Association, and the Emerging Leader Award by the global Women in Cognitive Science. In 2022 she was named the Gold Winner ‘Unifier of the Year’ by MHP’s #30ToWatchPolitics for the impact of her scientific research on bringing communities together in British politics.  

Her book, The Ideological Brain, is forthcoming in 2025 with Viking of Penguin Random House in the UK, Holt of Macmillan in the US, and in over 10 translated editions, including Flammarion in French, Suhrkamp in German, and Rizzoli in Italian