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 2026. 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.

Paul is Professor of Modern European History at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is the author of  Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (OUP, 2010), which was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (University of California Press, 2004), along with seven co-edited volumes.

His research centres on Modern European Cultural History in general and 20th Century German History in particular. He is especially interested in the relationship between culture and politics over the course of the century, and have worked on the themes of material culture, cultural diplomacy, photography, memory and nostalgia, human rights and international justice, death and changing notions of private life.

Paul’s most recent book is Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II (Profile, 2020), a monumental new history of post-war Europe described as “excellent” by the Financial Times. He is currently working on a new volume of history, entitled The Price of Velvet: The Underside of Europe’s 1989 Revolutions, which will be published by Allen Lane.

Charlotte Lydia Riley teaches history at the University of Southampton. Her first book, Imperial Island (Bodley Head, 2023), tells an alternative history of Britain from the Second World War to the present day. The book traces the ways that empire and decolonisation have left their mark on British history, society, politics and culture, and tells the story of how ordinary people’s lives have been shaped by the messy, complex, brutal, and surprising history of British imperialism.

Her writing about the empire, the Labour Party, feminism, and the game ‘patriarchy chicken’ has appeared in New Statesman, the Washington Post, Dazed, the New Humanist and Tribune, where she has a regular column. She has a history, politics and feminism podcast, Tomorrow Never Knows, with fellow historian Emma Lundin, and has appeared on Radio 4 talking about the histories of patriarchy and the Labour Party. She tweets, too much, about history, politics, trashy pop culture and her commute.

Photo courtesy of David Maguire

Emma is a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the Oxford Faculty of English and a Fellow of Hertford College.

Her first trade book, This is Shakespeare (Pelican, 2019), attracted praise from James Shapiro and Hilary Mantel, among others, and was a Times Book of the Year 2019. Alex Preston called it “the best introduction to the plays I’ve read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop”.

Her most recent work, Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers (Penguin, 2022), is a biography of encounters with books over the last millennium, focusing on the book as an object across centuries and continents. It was dubbed “a spine-tingling adventure” by The Guardian.

Photo courtesy of John Cairns

Kate is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. She has recently been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for her project on the history of silence in English. Literature and silence may seem a paradoxical subject, but in its treatment of silence, ‘literature penetrates the most profound aspects of our existence: our relationship with Nature and the divine; our understanding of what makes a self; our most powerful and intimate feelings of love and grief; our sense of wonder’.

A Literary History of Silence is the first comprehensive study of the subject, and will take us from the haunting Anglo-Saxon poems of exile, through eleven hugely varied centuries of literature, to an exploration of what silence can mean in our digital age.