Jessica holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of St Andrews. Her research has won funding and prizes from the British Academy, the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Russell Trust and the University of St Andrews, among others. Her first book Between Popes, Inquisitors and Princes revealed how the first Jesuits collaborated with the Holy See and crowned heads of Europe, often undercover, to fight heresy after the Reformation. Jessica has since written on the political tumults and religious transformations of the early modern period for prestigious historical journals and well-loved magazines like History Today.

Jessica’s latest book, City of Echoes (Icon, 2023) is a history of papal Rome, from Saint Peter to our own day, with a particular focus on the ostensibly ordinary people who have shaped the life and character of this extraordinary city.

Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her debut book Fifty Sounds, a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, was published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April 2021 and by Liveright in the US in early 2022. In 2022, Fifty Sounds was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Her translations have featured in Granta, Catapult, The White Review and Words Without Borders; and her full length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press, 2017), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Ray Bradbury Prize, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Her new book, Porn: An Oral History, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in March 2023 and is forthcoming from La Nave di Teseo in Italy.

 

Photo courtesy of Garry Loughlin

Amy Key is a writer based in London. She is the author of Arrangements in Blue (Jonathan Cape, 2023), chosen as a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times, Independent, Irish Times and Granta and shortlisted by Foyles for their Non Fiction Book of the Year 2023. She is also the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe (Salt, 2013) and Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe, 2018), which was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and a book of the year in the Guardian, New Statesman, Times and Irish Times. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised, and her essays have appeared in the collections At The Pond (2019) and By the River (2024) published by Daunt, as well as Granta, Vogue, The Poetry Review and elsewhere.

Photo courtesy of Suki Dhanda

Dr. Shilpa Ravella is a transplant gastroenterologist with expertise in nutrition and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.

Her first book, A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet and Disease, was published by The Bodley Head in the UK in 2022.

Shilpa is represented by Sally in the UK on behalf of Zoë Pagnamenta at The Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. 

Elliot Rappaport has sailed as a captain in the United States maritime industry since 1992, involved primarily in the training of other mariners aboard an assortment of traditional sailing ships. He is currently a faculty member at Maine Maritime Academy and has also worked extensively at the SEA Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Elliot lives in coastal Maine when not at sea.

His first book, Reading the Glass: A Sailor’s Story of Weather, was published in the UK by Sceptre in March 2023. This acclaimed work explores his life at sea, the history of seafaring, stories of explorers and discoveries and also provides a brilliant insight into the science of weather.

Photo courtesy of Stephen Rappaport

James is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford. He previously taught at Princeton and at SOAS, London. His A History of Algeria (Cambridge UP, 2017) was among the Financial Times’ best books of the year and co-winner of the BKFS Prize. He is currently completing Empire in Fragments, a history of colonialism and its legacies in France and Africa, which will be published by Princeton University Press. UK rights in his next book, Worlds of Islam: How Being Muslim Became Modern, have been acquired by Allen Lane.

Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh and studied English Literature, followed by Modern Greek, at Cambridge. Since his teens he has been a passionate admirer of all things Greek and an enthusiastic traveller around southern Europe and the Mediterranean.

For thirty years until his retirement he held the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London, and is now Emeritus. He is also Chair of the British School at Athens, one of the British International Research Institutes (BIRI) supported by the British Academy. In 2023 he received honorary citizenship of Greece and an honorary doctorate from the University of Patras. In 2024, he was awarded a knighthood in the King’s Birthday Honours list for ‘services to history and UK/Greek relations’, reflecting a long and distinguished academic career and books which have helped build strong, durable links between the UK and Greece.

He is the author of several books of non-fiction, one novel, and several translations of fiction and poetry. Among his books, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (Allen Lane, 2019) was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize and Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (CUP, 2013) for the Duff Cooper Prize. His other books include An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (OUP, 1999) and George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel. A Biography (YUP, 2003). All four were winners of the prestigious Runciman Award for best book on Greece and the Hellenic world. In Greece his work has won the Anagnostis, Daedalus, Epilogos and Vardinoyannis prizes and a Byron Medal awarded by the Academy of Athens.

Sir Roderick is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC), Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic, a distinction conferred on him by the President of Greece, Prokopios Pavlopoulos, in 2019, and since 2024 an Honorary Fellow of his Cambridge college, Peterhouse.

His most recent book, The Greeks: A Global History, was published by Faber in the UK and Basic Books in the USA in November 2021, and is now available in paperback from both publishers. Europe: A New History is due to be published by Allen Lane/Penguin and Basic Books in March 2026.