Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of the bestseller Deep House (UK: Allen Lane, 2025) and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Gay Bar (UK: Granta, 2021). His essays appear in numerous places including the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Yale Review, from which he was anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. His sound programs have been broadcast on NTS Radio.
Anja Shortland is a Professor in Political Economy at King’s College, London. Her undergraduate degree in Engineering at Oxford, a Masters in the Political Economy at LSE and a PhD in International Relations (also at the LSE), followed by appointments as Lecturer and Reader in Economics at Leicester and Brunel Universities make her a truly interdisciplinary scholar.
Anja teaches and studies the economics of crime, specialising in the governance of trades between legal entities and underworld organisations. She is an expert on piracy, kidnapping, art recovery, cultural property crime, and ransomware. Her novel insights into these opaque markets have been published in top academic journals and were widely covered in podcasts and the press, including articles in the Economist and the New Yorker. Her first book Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business was published by OUP in 2019 and won the Douglas North Award for the ‘Best Book in Institutional Economics’. Her second book Lost Art, the Art Loss Register’s Case Book (Unicorn, 2021) examines how the art market developed norms and processes for the restitution of stolen and looted art.
Anja lives in Wiltshire, England with her husband, two children, her flute and thousands of bees.
Photo courtesy of Urszula Sołtys
Anna Nicholas is the most prolific British author and journalist writing about Mallorca today. She has lived in Soller in the northwest of the island for 23 years with her husband and son and an ever-growing menagerie.
Following the publication of a successful Mallorca-based travel series with Summersdale (Hachette UK), she has ventured into crime fiction with a series featuring Isabel Flores, an unorthodox and charismatic Mallorcan sleuth, and her pet ferret, Furó. The first, The Devil’s Horn, was published in 2019 and translated into German by Diogenes Verlag in 2025. She is currently writing the fifth, White Hot Moon.
Anna is the Mallorca and Menorca destination writer for Telegraph UK and has written for numerous other leading publications including FT How to Spend It, The Times, Independent, Ultra Travel USA, Wanderlust and Tatler.
She graduated in English Literature and Classics from Leeds University and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, having participated in many humanitarian expeditions with veteran explorer, Colonel John Blashford-Snell. Her Summersdale memoir, Strictly Off the Record (2010), recounts her global adventures as an adjudicator at the Guinness Book of Records with founder, Norris McWhirter.
Roman Krznaric is a social philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to create change. His internationally bestselling books, including The Good Ancestor (W H Allen, 2020), Empathy (Rider, 2014) and Carpe Diem Regained (Unbound, 2017), have been published in more than 25 languages. He is Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing and founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum. His latest book is History for Tomorrow: How The Past Can Inspire Our Future (W H Allen, 2024).
After growing up in Sydney and Hong Kong, Roman studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, where he gained his PhD in political science. His writings have been widely influential amongst political and ecological campaigners, education reformers, social entrepreneurs and designers. An acclaimed public speaker, his talks and workshops have taken him from a London prison to the TED global stage.
Roman is a member of the Club of Rome and a Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation. He previously worked as an academic, a gardener and on human rights issues in Guatemala. He is also a top-ranked player of the medieval sport of real tennis.
Photo courtesy of Kate Raworth
Claire Mitchell KC is a Scottish advocate specialising in appellate law, with a particular focus on constitutional issues, human rights, and sentencing. She has been involved in significant cases before the Privy Council and Supreme Court, shaping key aspects of Scottish law. She regularly provides legal training and has received recognition for her contributions to legal thought, including a Special Recognition Award at the 2013 Law Awards of Scotland.
She leads the Witches of Scotland campaign with Zoe Venditozzi, and in 2022, Claire and Zoe were made Doctors of Laws by the University of Dundee in recognition of their work.
Through their tireless campaigning, regular public appearances, and highly entertaining podcast of the same name, this pair of ‘quarrelsome dames’ are currently working to build a lasting memorial to the murdered women, and campaign to draw attention to the continued persecution of women as witches around the world today.
How To Kill A Witch was published by Monoray in the UK in May 2025.
Liz Allan is an Australian writer and teacher living and working in the UK. Her short story, ‘Our Voices, Fierce’ was awarded the Rachel Funari Prize for fiction in 2018 and her stories have been shortlisted for the Alan Marshall Short Story Award and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize, and longlisted for the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize. Her manuscript ‘The Elementals’ was shortlisted for the 2023 Penguin Literary Prize and her manuscript ‘Equilibrium’ was shortlisted for a 2019 Overland Writers Residency. Her fiction has appeared in Overland, Verge, Yen magazine, Aesthetica and Best Summer Stories 2018.
Liz’s debut novel, In Bloom, will be published by Sceptre (UK) and Simon & Schuster (US) in Spring 2026.
Photo courtesy of Matilda Hill-Jenkins
Phuthuma Nhleko was until March 2011 the group CEO of MTN, at the time the sixth largest company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) by market capitalisation and the largest company with a primary listing in South Africa.
During his 10-year leadership tenure at MTN from 2002 to 2011, he transformed the company, driving its exponential growth through significant expansion covering 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East and serving over 240 million online customers. In May 2013, he returned as MTN Group Chairman and served until December 2019.
Nhleko’s previous directorships include BP Plc, Anglo American Plc, the Nedbank Group, Old Mutual SA, Johnnic Holdings, the Bidvest Group and Alexander Forbes. He holds a BSc in Civil Engineering from Ohio State University and a Master of Business Administration from Atlanta University (renamed Clark Atlanta University). He is a Fellow of University of Oxford, Blavatnik School of Government and Public Policy.
He is the Chairman and co-founder of Phembani Group a South African domiciled resource and energy-focused investment holding company that has a significant interest inter alia in downstream retailer Engen in partnership with Vitol, a Swiss-based Dutch multinational energy and commodity trading company. Phembani Group has JV partnerships with Glencore and Sibanye-Still Water in coal and platinum resources, respectively.
He is also the Chairman of Pembani Remgro Infrastructure Fund (PRIF) that invests in infrastructure projects on the African continent, Chairman of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), Director of IHS Towers and Chairman of Tullow Oil Plc.
Andrew Hui is a literary historian who traces the smallest turns of language to uncover the largest ideas.
The author of three books—The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton 2025); A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton, 2019, translated into five languages); and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (Fordham, 2017), he explores the movement of knowledge—how ideas migrate, traditions rupture, and new forms emerge.
His work has been reviewed in the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal and writings have appeared in Paris Review, Public Domain Review and LitHub. He has also spoken on BBC radio and Swiss TV.
After earning his PhD from Princeton, Hui held fellowships at the Warburg Institute in London, Villa I Tatti in Florence, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He taught for three years at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow, and from 2012 to 2025, was one of the inaugural faculty members at Yale-NUS College (now defunct). He currently teaches at National University of Singapore, where he is at work on The Emperor’s Maze: the Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global Age.
As an Asian American teaching the European classics in Asia, he has devoted his life to studying the languages and cultures of both worlds.
Photo courtesy of Maurice Weiss
Non is a writer, garden designer and wildflower hunter. She writes extensively and imaginatively on gardens and plants. She is Contributing Editor at House & Garden, writes regularly for Country Life and has a monthly column for The English Garden, taking over in 2021 from Katherine Swift (The Morville Hours). She has contributed to Gardens Illustrated, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Spectator Online.
As a designer, her emphasis is on using plants to create atmosphere. As well as private gardens in London, Suffolk, Sussex and Oxfordshire, public projects include the Fox Garden at the South London Gallery, the Church of St Mary the Boltons in South Kensington and currently the Leach Pottery in St Ives.
Based in London but frequently travelling in search of wonder, wildness and astonishingly flowery places, her first book Flora Alpina, The Wild Romance of Mountain Flowers will be published in 2027.
Photo courtesy of Rachel Warne
Emily is interested in how children are cared for, and who by. Her first book, Saving the Children (UCP, 2021), was shortlisted for the RHS Whitbread Prize and Grace Abbott Book Prize. Now, she is working on a new project titled Love’s Labour: A History of Love and Work, which traces the story of infant care from Victorian baby farms to modern day nursery schools. Her writing on childcare, child rights and contemporary welfare states can be found in Jacobin, Tribune, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Emily has worked and studied at universities across the world, including in New York, Florence and Cape Town, and is now a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sheffield. She has also collaborated extensively with the humanitarian sector, teaching history to aid workers and helping modern NGOs grapple with the legacies of their colonial pasts. She’s the chairperson of a community playschool in Sheffield
Photo courtesy of Andrew Roberts
