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.
Andrew Prentice and Jonathan Weil are the authors of a rollicking adventure and time travel middle grade novel, Black Arts, featuring young Jack the Cutpurse and Beth Sharkwell, daughter of the master of thieves in 1590s London (David Fickling Books, 2012). The sequel, Devil’s Blood, was published in 2016. Both authors live in London.
Eleanor is the prizewinning author of several historical novels, the Montmorency series (Scholastic, 2003-2013), Johnny Swanson (David Fickling Books, 2010), as well as Saved (Barrington Stoke, 2008), The Last Minute (David Fickling, 2013), both of which are set in the present day, and numerous short stories. She won the 2004 Blue Peter Prize for “The Book I Couldn’t Put Down” category, the Silver Smarties prize, and the Fantastic Book Award. She has been on the judging panels for several literary awards, including the Costa, the Guardian, and the Royal Society Awards.
Before becoming an author, Eleanor was a producer for the BBC, working mainly on current affairs programmes. She has a PhD in history and sits on the Clinical Ethics Committee at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and the UK Donation Ethics Committee. She is also a governor of the children’s charity, Coram, and an ambassador for the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts.
Eleanor’s personal appearances are handled by Authors Aloud UK (info@authorsalouduk.co.uk)
Hugh Wilford is Professor of U.S. History at California State University, Long Beach. He is author of, among other books, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008), a history of covert CIA funding of apparently private American citizen groups in the Cold War. His most recent book, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (Basic Books, 2013), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and won the Washington Institute Gold Medal Book Prize, 2014. Hugh is currently at work on a general history of the CIA for The Great Courses, the prestigious U.S. series of video lectures.
Dr. Wilford published his latest book, The CIA: An Imperial History, in June 2024 with Basic Books. Building on the idea of “covert empire” conceptualized by Priya Satia in her 2008 Spies in Arabia, the book explores how generations of CIA officers tried but ultimately failed to transcend the gravitational pull of western imperial history.
An experienced, award-winning television journalist, Kirsty’s debut novel, The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle (2014), takes place against the deeply atmospheric background of Aran Island off the West coast of Scotland where the heroine Martha inherits a beautiful house by chance and thus discovers its tragic history. It was bought in a two book deal by Lisa Highton for Two Roads Press and sold in Germany and Spain. Kirsty has presented a wide range of TV programmes over the past thirty years – from the ground breaking Late Show to Election Specials, live stadium events and, since 1993, the BBC’s flagship nightly current affairs show Newsnight. She loves cooking and reached the final in Celebrity Masterchef in 2011, hosted a culinary quiz and took part in The Great Comic Relief Bake-Off.
Kirsty’s most recent book, The House by the Loch, was published in June 2019 by Two Roads Press and became a Scottish number one bestseller. She is currently writing a historical fiction novel for John Murray.
Edmund de Waal is an artist and writer. Born in 1964, he is best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels. His work has been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Artipleag, Stockholm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Kunsthaus, Graz, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Gagosian Gallery, Beverley Hills and New York and the Royal Academy in London. His work can be found in numerous public collections worldwide.
He has been widely published. His family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes(Vintage, 2010), has won many literary awards and is an international bestseller, with editions published in 29 languages.
His second book, The White Road, was published in 2015 by Vintage. The same year he was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University. De Waal was made an OBE for his services to art in 2011 and promoted to CBE in 2021. He is on the Advisory Committee for The Royal Mint and is a Trustee for The Saturday Club and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Letters to Camondo, was published by Chatto in April 2021, becoming a no. 5 Sunday Times Bestseller. It was also shortlisted for the 2022 Wingate Literary Prize.
Historian, filmmaker and broadcaster, Michael Wood is the author of multiple bestselling books, including four UK number one bestsellers, and well over one hundred documentary films, among them In the Footsteps of Alexander the GreatandThe Story of India, which the Wall Street Journal described as ‘still the gold standard’ of documentary history-making. His Story of England, which told the tale of one village, Kibworth in Leicestershire, through British history, was called by the Independent ‘the most innovative history series ever on TV’.
In 2013 he became Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. Michael is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. He recently received the British Academy President’s Medal for services to History and an OBE for services to broadcasting.
Of his documentary series Story of China (BBC2, 2016) the state news agency in China, Xinhua, said it had ‘transcended the barriers of ethnicity and belief and brought something inexplicably powerful and touching to the TV audience’. Simon and Schuster published his epic one-volume history The Story of China to widespread acclaim in 2020.
To mark the book’s fortieth anniversary, BBC Books published a fully revised and expanded edition of Michael Wood’s In Search of the Dark Ages, which overturned preconceptions of the Early Middle Ages as a shadowy and brutal era when it was first published in 1981. This updated version has all-new chapters on fascinating characters, such Penda of Mercia, Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians, Hadrian the African, Eadgyth of England, and Wynflaed, providing a more varied and inclusive study on the creation of Britain.
Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, science, and culture, among other subjects, for many publications, including Wired, The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone; he is contributing editor to Artforum and the design magazines Print and I.D. and a columnist for Slate magazine.
He has two previous books, New York Times bestseller Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (Allen Lane, 2008) and You May Also Like: Taste in An Age of Endless Choice(Simon & Schuster, 2016). Beginners: The Curious Power of Lifelong Learning, published by Atlantic Books in January 2021, was a Guardian Book of the Week .
