Chloe won a ARHC studentship to study the MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University where she graduated with distinction, winning the universities taught masters prize and Northern Writers Award. Her debut novel Fish Boy was published by Faber & Faber in 2017 to critical acclaim; it was nominated for the Carnegie Medal, longlisted for the UKLA and shortlisted for the Branford Boase children’s debut of the year.
Chloe won the inaugural Julia Darling Fellowship to research her second novel The Boy Who Hit Play (Faber, 2018), travelling around the wild icy land of Norway and its many beautiful islands, then journeyed across the otherworldly land of Peru thanks to the fantastic support of the Arts Council England. Her third novel, Fire Girl Forest Boy, was published in June 2019 by Faber, and won the Gandys Children’s Travel Book of the Year.
Chloe Daykin lives in Northumberland with her family including one husband, two boys and three cats. She loves an unusual adventure and is a fan of all things fun, poetic and surprising.
Josephine is currently Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor of Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford. In January 2025 she will take up the Professorship of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, the eighth person and first woman to hold that position since its creation in 1898. She has degrees from Oxford and Berkeley, she has taught in America, Italy, and the UK, and she co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the LRB, as well as to radio and television programmes.
Her latest academic book, In Search of the Phoenicians, was published by Princeton University Press in January 2018, and her first trade book, How the World Made the West, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2024. It tells the story of the diverse roots of western civilization from the Bronze Age to the Age of Discovery, and makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong. It is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history – people do.
Andrew Pettegree is one of the leading experts on Europe during the Reformation. He currently holds a professorship at St Andrews University where he is the director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project.
His prizewinning study of early print culture, The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010) was a New York Times notable book of the year, and The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014) won Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize. Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation(Penguin, 2015), was described by the Washington Post as ‘A remarkable story, and one sure to change the way we think about the early Reformation’. The Library: A Fragile History, was published in 2021, and co-written with Arthur der Weduwen. This ‘sweeping, absorbing history’ (Richard Ovenden) was named a Sunday Times Book of the Year and longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 2022. In 2021, Andrew was elected a Fellow of The British Academy.
In his latest book, The Book At War (Profile, 2023), Andrew traces the surprising ways in which written culture – from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank – has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age.
Michael Wooldridge is a Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Hertford College. His main research interests are in artificial intelligence, and since 1989 he has published over three hundred and fifty scientific articles on this subject.
He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), and the European Association for AI (EurAI). From 2014-16, he was President of the European Association for AI, and from 2015-17 he was President of the International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI). He lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.
His new book, The Road to Conscious Machines, is out now from Pelican, with more information available on the Oxford University website here.
James teaches English Literature and Film Studies at the University of Ottawa. His first book, Gilded Youth: Privilege and Rebellion in the British Public School, was published by Reaktion in February 2019.
His new book, Accelerate! A History of the 1990s, was published by The History Press in 2022.
Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. He founded WBS’s Behavioural Science group, which this the largest of its kind in Europe, is co-founder of research consultancy Decision Technology, advises the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team and was scientist-in-residence on the BBC Radio 4 series The Human Zoo. He is a member of the UK committee on Climate Change, and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and British Academy.
The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth was published by Allen Lane in 2018 and won the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award in 2019, for Best book in Clinical Psychology. The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World, co-written with Morten H. Christiansen, was published Bantam Press in the UK and by Basic Books in the US – both in Spring 2022.
Dominic Frisby is that unusual combination, a comedian and a financial writer. He has written two previous books,Life After the State(2013) and Bitcoin (2014), both for Unbound. Daylight Robbery: The Past, Present and Future of Tax, was published by Penguin Portfolio in 2019.
His latest book, The Secret History of Gold (Penguin, 2025), is the definitive biography of the metal that has shaped our world – and may yet determine its fate.
Susan Golombok is Professor Emerita of Family Research and Director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge. Susan has pioneered research on new family forms including families created through assisted reproductive technologies, such as egg donation and surrogacy, and families with same-sex and transgender parents. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.
Her first book, We Are Family: What Really Matters for Parents and Children, published by Scribe in 2020, tells the stories of these families and challenges the widely-held assumption that children in new family forms are less likely to flourish than are children in traditional families. Susan has advised policy-makers and legislators around the world on same-sex marriage and assisted reproduction. She regularly gives presentations about her research to public audiences in the UK and internationally, and her work has been widely reported in the media.
Greg Wise has written a moving, thought-provoking and surprisingly funny book with his sister Clare, who died of cancer in September 2016. Not That Kind of Love is both a wonderful description of a journey to death and a celebration of the act of living. Based on Clare Wise’s blog, which she started when she was first diagnosed with cancer in 2013, the book charts the highs and lows of the last three years of Clare’s life. As she becomes too weak to type, her brother – the actor Greg Wise, who has moved in to care for her – takes over, and the book morphs into a beautiful meditation on life, and the necessity of talking about death.
His book Last Christmas, co-edited with Emma Thompson, was published by Quercus in October 2019.
K J Whittaker is the Carnegie-nominated author of six YA novels published by Walker Books under the name Katy Moran. False Lights, set in England in 1817, two years after Napoleon has won the Battle of Waterloo, was published by Head of Zeus in 2017. ‘The quality of the story in itself is sufficient to carry this novel, but excellent writing and characterization pushed it up several notches—with special mention for Hester: a fizzing-with-life, believable and resourceful heroine if ever there was one’ — Elizabeth Buchan, Daily Mail.
