Alistair Morgan is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. His short stories have twice appeared in The Paris Review. In 2009 he won the George Plimpton Prize for Fiction for his stories Icebergs and Departure, which was also selected for the National Magazine Awards. His story Icebergs was short-listed for the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing. His novels include: Sleeper’s Wake (Granta, 2009), winner of the 2010 First-time Published Author Award South Africa and shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Africa Region), and The Land Within(Penguin South Africa, 2012), shortlisted for the 2013 M-Net Literary Award.
Damon is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and playwright. He was born in Pretoria in 1963 and studied drama at the University of Cape Town, writing his first novel, A Sinless Season (Jonathan Ball, 1984), when he was seventeen. Small Circle of Beings (Lowry Publishers, 1988), a collection of short stories, was followed by the novel The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (Scribners, 1991) and The Quarry (Viking, 1995).
His novel, The Good Doctor (Grove Press, 2003), set in post-Apartheid South Africa, explores the uneasy friendship between two very different men in a deserted, rural hospital. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Other recent titles include The Impostor (winner of the 2008 University of Johannesburg English Literary Award, shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, M-Net literary award and Sunday Times Fiction Prize); In A Strange Room(shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, the 2011 Ondaatje Prize and the 2011 M-Net Literary Award); and Arctic Summer (winner of the Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year 2014, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize 2015 and the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, longlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize).
Damon is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After being previously shortlisted in 2003 and 2010,Damon won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2021 for his latest book The Promise (Chatto & Windus). Set on a farm outside Pretoria, The Promise charts the burn and crash of a white South African family and was described by Maya Jasanoff, Chair of the Judges, as ‘a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh’. The Financial Times, The Times, the Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The New Statesman and The New York Times all chose The Promiseas one of their Books of the Year. In 2022, The Promisewas one of eight books shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Translation rights have been sold in over thirty territories and counting.
Damon is currently working on a collection of short stories that will be published by Chatto & Windus in 2025.
Graham Caveney began his writing career at the New Musical Express in the 1980s before going to write for a variety of papers and magazines including The Face, City Limits, Q, Guardian, The Independent, The Independent On Sunday, Arena and GQ.
His books include Shopping In Space: Essays on Blank American Fiction (Serpent’s Tail, 1992; with Elizabeth Young); biographies of William Burroughs – The Priest, They Called Him (Bloomsbury, 1997) and Allen Ginsberg – Screaming with Joy(Bloomsbury, 1999).
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness (Picador, 2017), a memoir about growing up in the North of England during the 1970s and his experiences of Catholic sexual abuse, was shortlisted for the Portico Prize.
On Agoraphobia, was published by Picador in 2022 and is a fascinating, entertaining and sometimes painfully acute look at what it means to go through life with an anxiety disorder that evades easy definition.
His latest book, The Body in the Library (Peninsula Press) will be published this month, charting a year of disease from diagnosis to past ‘original sell-by-date’. Shot through with Northerness, tenderness, and Caveney’s trademark humour, The Body in the Library reflects on an unfinished lifetime filled with books and with love.
Rebecca Lowe is a freelance journalist from London who specialises in human rights and the Middle East. In 2015-16, she cycled 11,000km solo from London to Tehran. Her first book, The Slow Road to Tehran, documenting her year-long journey, paints a living portrait of the Middle East through its people, its politics and its historic relationship with the West, and challenges much of the perceived wisdom about this region of the world. It was published in Spring 2022 by September Books in the UK and MVG in Germany.
During her career, Rebecca has written for publications including the Guardian, BBC, Independent, Huffington Post, Economist, Sunday Times Magazine, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Spectator, IranWire and numerous travel, music and sports magazines. From 2010-15, she was the lead reporter at the International Bar Association, where she focused on human rights and the rule of law, and in 2018 she contributed to the adventure travel anthology The Kindness of Strangers: Travel Stories That Make Your Heart Grow, published by Summersdale. Rebecca is a Fellow at the Royal Geographical Society, and holds a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University and an MA in Journalism from Stanford University, where she was awarded a scholarship.
Dr Stella Botchway is a writer, academic and Consultant in Public Health Medicine. She studied medicine at the University of Oxford, where she is now a Clinical Researcher and NIHR Doctoral Fellow. Her academic research looks at the healthcare needs of adolescents at risk of self-harm.
Stella has worked with a wide variety of national and international organisations, and writes fiction and non-fiction for academic, professional and general audiences. She was the recipient of an Arts Council Award in 2020.
Writing as Esi Merleh, the is the author of the Magic Faces series published by UCLan Press. The first book in the series, Heroes of the Pirate Ship, was nominated for the Brilliant Book Award, 2024, and was chosen for the Summer Reading Challenge Book Collection, 2024. As Stella Botchway, she writes fiction for young readers with Oxford University Press. Her most recent titles for the Readerful series include Beyond Aquatica, a picture book to be read aloud by an adult for inspiring reading sessions, and The Adventures of Daisy and Red: Moonbow Rescue, for older, struggling readers.
Ọrẹ is a Nigerian-British Politics and International Relations graduate from Jesus College, Cambridge. Whilst at Cambridge she pioneered the Benin Bronze Repatriation Campaign, the #BlackMenOfCambridgeUniversity Campaign and was President of the African-Caribbean Society.
She has since completed a Masters in Journalism at Columbia University, New York and is currently working as a Special Assistant and Speechwriter to the Vice President of Nigeria.
She co-authored Taking Up Space with Chelsea Kwakye, which aims to tackle issues of access, unrepresentative curricula, discrimination and show the activist zeal of Black women within university spaces. It was published by Random House Heinemann in June 2019 as the flagship release of Stormzy’s imprint, Merky Books.
Chelsea Kwakye is a British-Ghanaian History graduate from Homerton College, Cambridge. Whilst at Cambridge she was the only Black girl in her year group of around 200 people studying History. During her time at University, she was Homerton’s BME Officer and Vice-President of the African-Caribbean Society. She is currently studying at the University of Law in preparation for a training contract with a city law firm in London.
She co-authored Taking Up Space with Ore Ogunbiyi, which aims to tackle issues of access, unrepresentative curricula, discrimination and show the activist zeal of Black women within university spaces. It was published by Random House Heinemann in June 2019 as the flagship release of Stormzy’s imprint, Merky Books.
Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian, the 25th person to hold the senior executive position in the library of the University of Oxford. Since 1987 he has worked in a number of important archives and libraries, including the House of Lords Library, the National Library of Scotland (as a Curator of Rare Books) and in the University of Edinburgh, where he was Director of Collections. He moved to the Bodleian Libraries in 2003 as Keeper of Special Collections, becoming Deputy Librarian in 2011. Richard was awarded the OBE in The Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2019.
Richard has written extensively on professional concerns of library and information management, and on the history of the deliberate destruction of knowledge. Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack (2020), was published by John Murray in the UK and by Harvard University Press in the US. It was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and a Times Book of the Year. ‘”Passionate and illuminating… this splendid book reveals how, in today’s world of fake news and alternative facts, libraries stand defiant as guardians of truth” — The Times.
Tiffany Watt Smith is a cultural historian. Her most recent book Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune explores this much-maligned emotion, and was published in Autumn 2018 (UK, Wellcome/Profile; US, Little Brown). Her previous book, The Book of Human Emotions(UK Wellcome/Profile 2015; US Little Brown, 2016) tells the stories of 154 feelings from around the world, and has been published in 9 countries so far. She is also the author of an academic monograph On Flinching (OUP, 2014). Her latest book, Bad Friend (Faber, 2025) offers what’s long overdue: a more expansive, more rebellious vision of female friendship fit for twenty-first-century life.
She was educated at the universities of Cambridge and London, and is currently a senior research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and a lecturer in the School of English and Drama there. Her research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
In 2014, she was named a BBC New Generation Thinker, and appears frequently on BBC Radio 4 and 3. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Scientist, BBC Magazine and The Pool among others. Her TED talk The History of Human Emotions has been viewed by over 1.6 million people around the world.
Dr Ian Black (1953-2023) was a Middle East editor, diplomatic editor and European editor for the Guardian newspaper. He reported and commented extensively on the Arab uprisings and their aftermath in Syria, Libya and Egypt, and paid frequent visits to Iran, the Gulf and across the MENA region. He earned an MA in History and Social and Political Science from the University of Cambridge and held a PhD in government from LSE.
During his accomplished career, Ian wrote for the Economist, the Washington Post and many other publications, and was a regular commentator on TV and radio on Middle Eastern and international affairs. He wrote the introduction to The Arab Spring(Guardian Books, 2012); Israel’s Secret Wars (Grove Press, 1991), Zionism and the Arabs, 1936–1939 (Taylor & Francis, 1986, 2015); and contributed to the Encyclopaedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa (Macmillan Library Reference, 2004).
His book, Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, told a new history of the Palestine–Israel conflict to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration and the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war. Published by Allen Lane in 2017, it has been hailed as ‘a nuanced, landmark study that deservedly won plaudits from both Palestinian and Israeli historians’ (The Times).
