Jenny is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Her work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it’s birdwatching, collecting screenshots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and Sierra Magazine. Her New York Times bestselling book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was published by Melville House in 2019, and was selected by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year.

Jenny’s recent book, Saving Time, promising to show us “how we can start to reclaim time from a culture hell-bent on commodifying and capitalising it”, was published by Bodley Head in March 2023.

Jenny is represented by Carrie in the UK on behalf of Caroline Eisenmann at Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

Photo courtesy of Ryan Meyer

Professor Nicola Rollock is an academic, consultant and public speaker specialising in racial justice in education and the workplace. She is author of a transformative new book – The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival – published by Penguin Press in October 2022.

In 2021 Nicola was appointed as Professor of Social Policy and Race at King’s College London.  She is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and Senior Adviser on Race; Higher Education to the Vice Chancellor at the University of Cambridge.

She is probably best known for her research on Black female professors and the related exhibition Phenomenal Women: portraits of UK Black female professors which went on display at London’s Southbank Centre in 2020 and the University of Cambridge in 2021. In Summer 2020, she appeared as an expert contributor in the BAFTA-winning two-part Channel 4 documentary The School That Tried to End Racism, which tracked a group of Year 7 pupils as they explored their racial bias through a range of specially designed activities.

Nicola is featured in Apolitical’s list of 100 most influential academics in government and in 2020 was included, following nomination by Baroness Doreen Lawrence, in the Duke & Duchess of Sussex’s list of Next Generation Trailblazers for “challenging prejudice and contributions to British society”. In 2019, she was selected by Times Higher journalists as one of 11 scholars globally to have influenced debates in higher education.

Her work has been featured across the press including the Guardian, British Vogue and the Financial Times.

Praise for The Racial Code:

“This book has done more to help me understand the microaggressions that people of colour routinely face than any other…” Caroline Sanderson, Editor’s Choice,  The Bookseller

“A powerful, salient and gracefully written study of the corrosive dynamics of race in Britain from a trusted voice on the subject…” Diana Evans

“A forensic and no-nonsense unpacking of everyday racism and the often invisible ‘racial rulebook’ that dictates all of our lives…” Yomi Adegoke

Sally is a science and technology journalist in London. Her first book, We Are Electric, tells the fascinating story of nature’s electrical communication networks, both in our bodies and brains, and in the rest of the natural world. Published by Canongate in 2022, the book helps readers understand why biological electricity is so essential to all life, and navigate what is becoming the most promising science of the 21st century. We Are Electric was a New Scientist Best Popular Science Book of 2023 and was selected by The Independent as one their Books of the Month for February.

Sally’s award-winning stories about microchip kill switches, the Westphalian future of the internet, young blood, and black mould have appeared in BBC Future, The New York Times, IEEE Spectrum, The Economist, and New Scientist, where she was a technology features and news editor for seven years and where she now writes a regular column. She also writes about the linguistic indignities of being an American expat in London (among other things) for the science blog The Last Word on Nothing. She has appeared on BBC Breakfast to debunk the myth of baby brain, and at various conferences and festivals to describe the terror and transcendence of zapping one’s brain with a 9-volt battery.

Dr Camilla Nord is a neuroscientist at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, whose expertise is the brain basis of mental health.

Her goal is to discover how cognitive neuroscience can be translated into new clinical treatments and prevention techniques, particularly for mental health conditions or symptoms falling at the intersection of physical and mental health.

Her first book, The Balanced Brain: The Real Neuroscience of Wellbeing, examines what we really know about things like happiness, pleasure and mental health in the brain, and was published by Penguin Press in 2023.

Lucy Ash presents radio and TV documentaries for BBC Current Affairs. She began her career in Moscow just as the Soviet Union was falling apart and she has followed developments there ever since. Driven by a passion for justice and human rights, she focuses on characters at the margins of society and conflicts which have dropped out of the headlines.

She speaks fluent French, Russian and she is a trustee of Jerwood Arts. She lives in London. Lucy’s work has been described as “unforgettable” and “taken from journalism’s top drawer”. She has won the Sony Gold, Amnesty International, the One World Radio Documentary Award, New York Festivals Radio Award and Radio Story of the Year award from the Foreign Press Association.

The Baton and the Cross combines historical research with vivid present-day reportage, to explore the impact the Orthodox Church is having on Russia, its view of itself and its role in the world.

Samira Ahmed is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and writer who specialises in the intersection of popular culture, history, politics and social change. She presents Front Row on Radio 4, Newswatch on BBC1 and has worked as an anchor and correspondent for Channel 4 News, where she won the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year award, BBC News and Deutsche Welle TV. As the BBC’s Los Angeles Correspondent she covered the OJ Simpson civil trial. Her documentaries include 2020’s Art of Persia for BBC4, which was the first major Western documentary series to be filmed in Iran for 40 years.

Photo courtesy of Foreign & Commonwealth Office

Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was a legendary film director, writer, artist, gardener, set designer, and gay rights activist. Jarman started out in set design, working as a production designer on ‘The Devils’, directed by Ken Russell and made his first foray into film with a number of experimental super 8 mm shorts.

His first feature was the low budget Sebastiane (1976), a story about the martyrdom of St. Sebastian and one of the first British films to depict positive images of gay sexuality. This was followed by films such as Jubilee (1978), in which Queen Elizabeth I of England seems to be transported forward in time to a desolate wasteland, and The Last of England (1987), which passed on judgement on the internal decay and economic restructuring of Thatcher’s government.

His 1989 film War Requiem brought Laurence Olivier out of retirement for what would be his last screen performance and his 1986 film Caravaggio, a pastiche period biopic on the life of seventeenth-century painter Michelangelo de Caravaggio, received critical acclaim. In addition to his feature film work, Jarman worked with some of the most successful musicians of his era, including The Smiths, The Sex Pistols and The Pet Shop Boys, producing music videos and film installations for live shows.

During the 1980s, Jarman campaigned against Clause 28, which sought to ban the promotion of homosexuality in schools. After being diagnosed HIV positive in December 1986, he was also one of the only UK public figures to speak out about his condition and criticised the slow response to the AIDS crisis. Jarman is also remembered for his famous shingle cottage-garden Prospect Cottage, created in the latter years of his life, in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station. This iconic house and garden can still be visited today thanks to the Save Prospect Cottage campaign, which saw Art Fund and Creative Folkestone rescue the property from private sale in 2020.

Jarman is the author of several books, including his autobiography Dancing Ledge (Quartet, 1984), which details his life until the age of 40 and is a candid account of hardships and joys of a life devoted to filmmaking. He published a poetry collection A Finger in the Fishes Mouth (Bettiscombe Press, 1972), two volumes of diaries Modern Nature (Century, 1991) and Smiling in Slow Motion (Vintage, 2001) and two treatises on his work in film and art The Last of England (Constable, 1997) and Chroma (Vintage, 1995). His only piece of narrative fiction, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping, was published by House Sparrow Press in 2022.

On the 25th anniversary of Jarman’s death, Vintage Classics reissued four of his most celebrated works with forewords by Ali Smith (Chroma), Olivia Laing (Modern Nature), Neil Bartlett (Smiling in Slow Motion) and Matthew Todd (At Your Own Risk). In 2021, The Manchester Art Gallery staged a major retrospective of Jarman’s work, “PROTEST!”, which captured Jarman’s engagement with both art and society, as well as his contemporary concerns with political protest and personal freedoms arising from the AIDS crisis.

FBA represents the literary estate of Derek Jarman, comprising of his written works (not films and art work).

Catherine reports on Russia for the Washington Post. She worked from 2007-2013 as the Moscow Correspondent for the Financial Times. She has previously reported on Russia for the Moscow Times and Business Week. In 2009, she was shortlisted for Business Journalist of the year at the British Press Awards and served as an investigative correspondent for Reuters. In 2023 Belton was awarded an MBE for services to journalism in the New Year’s Honours list.

Her first book, Putin’s People, published by William Collins in 2020, was a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, and a Times, Sunday Times, and Telegraph Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize.

‘Books about modern Russia abound… Belton has surpassed them all. Her much-awaited book is the best and most important on modern Russia. It benefits from a meticulous compilation of open sources, but also from the accounts of disillusioned Kremlin insiders, former business cronies and some remarkably candid people still high up in the system. The result is hair-raising’ — The Times. 

Jonathan is an independent scientist and consultant to organizations such as the UN Environment Programme and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) on the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. Originally trained in biology and environmental science, he is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent.

Life Story: Nature, Culture, Future, his first book, was acquired by Jonathan Cape in a significant pre-empt for publication in 2023. North American rights have also been sold to Basic, Chinese rights to Citic and Spanish rights to Debate. Life Story is a grand tour of the history of life on our planet from its very beginnings, showing us how nature gave birth to culture, how they grew apart, and asking what evolutionary history lessons we can learn to help us face the future as we reach one of the most critical junctures in the history of life on Earth. It shows how biological evolution produced complexity and diversity from simple origins, how cultural evolution took our species outside the confines of biology to become the most complex, diverse and dominant species of all, and how a third phase of evolution could completely change the direction that life will take in the future.

Her most recent book It’s Not Fair: why it’s time for a grown-up conversation about how adults treat children (June 2024, Scribe) offers a practical manifesto for children’s liberation. It’s Not Fair argues that children’s resistance and struggle for equality has been largely ignored by the wider social justice movement, and that it’s time to stop viewing children as less than adults and start fighting for their rights to be taken seriously.

Her first book Extraordinary Parenting: the essential guide to parenting and educating at home (May 2020, Scribe) provides clear, practical advice on parenting whilst navigating a changing and uncertain world.She writes the newsletter Small Places, which focuses on parenting, education, children’s rights, and children’s liberation.

Born in Brighton, she has been educated at Cambridge University and at UCL’s Institute of Education, and currently lives in London.