Melody Razak is a British -Iranian fiction writer from London, with an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck. Before she started writing, she owned treacle&co, a cafe in Brighton and more recently worked in the kitchens of Honey and Co in London as a pastry chef.
Melody’s debut novel, Moth, tells the heart-rending story of a Brahmin family living in 1940’s Delhi during India’s Independence and subsequent Partition. It explores the impact of disproportionate violence on the lives of the women who carry so much of the emotional labour during times of political unrest. It probes the structures of an already fractious society, examines who the ‘other’ is, and what it means to be free. It looks too at the domestic sphere, at different types of love and is ultimately a celebration of the human spirit.
UK & Commonwealth rights sold at auction to Weidenfeld & Nicolson, for publication in June 2021. Melody was selected as one of the Observer‘s ‘Ten Debut Novelists’ of 2021 and as one of Harper’s Bazaar‘s ‘Five Debut Female Authors to Read This Summer’. Moth was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2022 and the Desmond Elliott Prize.
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.
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.
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.
Natasha is a journalist at Red magazine and the founder of Conversations on Love, an email newsletter investigating love one interview at a time. Through conversations with guests such as Hilary Mantel, Susie Orbach and Lemn Sissay, she hopes to invite readers to think more deeply about all the different forms of love in their lives.
Natasha’s her first book, also called Conversations on Love, asks three big questions: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it? She explores these questions through intimate conversations with authors, writers and experts, and also through her own personal stories and observations, which tie together lessons she’s learnt from writing her newsletter, from studying an introduction to couples therapy, and from life itself.
Conversations on Love was sold to Viking in the UK after a sixteen-publisher auction and published in July 2021. Upon publication, it entered the Sunday Times Bestsellers list and was described by Stylist as ‘wise, wonderful, moving and brilliant.’
Born in London and educated at Merton College, Oxford, Michael is a writer, art historian and radio broadcaster. He has penned monographs on Lynn Chadwick, Sandra Blow, Bryan Wynter and George Fullard, and written books on the St Ives Artists and ideas that changed art, as well as a journey through 40,000 years of art history for children.
His latest book, This Is Tomorrow: Twentieth-century Britain and its Artists, was published by Thames & Hudson in Autumn 2022. It tells the story of a century of seismic change viewed through the lens of artists’ work and lives.
Thomas holds a Ph.D. in medieval history from Clare College, Cambridge, and is an editorial director at Penguin UK. His first book, the bestselling Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England (Penguin Press UK; Simon & Schuster US, 2011) won the HW Fisher Prize and was named a Book of the Year in nine different publications, and its success led to him presenting an hour-long BBC documentary. Since then, Thomas has written on Edward V for Penguin’s Monarchs series, and played cricket for the Authors XI*, a team composed of English writers.
His latest book, The Brothers York: A Royal Tragedy (Penguin, 2020), brings England’s White Rose to spectacular life, shedding new light on a dynasty that could have been as powerful as the Tudors had it not destroyed itself, within a single generation, in a catastrophic maelstrom of rebellion, vendetta, usurpation and regicide.
*originally founded in 1891, when it boasted Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse and AA Milne as members, the Authors XI released a book about their exploits in 2013, A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon, to which Thomas contributed a chapter.
Matthew is an inspirational teacher and star of Channel 4’s multi award-winning documentary series, Educating Yorkshire. His warmth, humour, and energetic style of teaching have endeared him to audiences the country over, with incredible breakthrough moments that brought millions of TV and YouTube viewers to tears. Now a Head (and still an English teacher), he is committed to achieving the best for every child, and to ensuring that barriers to opportunity – whatever they may be – are challenged and removed, allowing every young person to become the very best they can be.
Matthew’s first book, Go Big, a secondary school survival guide for readers aged 10+, was published in 2020 by Hachette Children’s Wren & Rook imprint. This was followed by Back on Track in 2021: a motivational and hopeful handbook for frazzled secondary school kids everywhere. His latest book, How To Ace Your Exams (Hachette, 2024) is a handy guidebook to help you pass with flying colours.
Samantha Walton teaches literature at Bath Spa University. Her first book, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. It tells the story of how and why we seek nature for health and wellbeing, from sacred springs to forest baths, city parks to the brave new world of virtual nature. Everybody Needs Beauty also looks at how climate change will transform this most vital relationship between our mental health and the earth, and asks what we can do to make a difference.
Samantha has held research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and the Rachel Carson Center (LMU, Germany), and recently won a prestigious grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. In 2019, she made a short film with the BBC Winterwatch team to celebrate the mountain writing of the Scottish author, Nan Shepherd. As a poet, Samantha has published a collection with Boiler House Press called Self Heal (2018), co-edits the poetry publisher Sad Press, and has contributed to Chicago Review, Granta, and MAI.
