Krystal Sutherland was born and raised in Townsville, Australia, a place that has never experienced winter. Since then she’s lived in Sydney, where she edited her university’s student magazine; Amsterdam, where she worked as a foreign correspondent; and Hong Kong. Krystal has also interned at Bloomsbury Publishing and was shortlisted for the Queensland Young Writers Award. Our Chemical Hearts was published in the UK in 2016 by Hot Key Books – and subsequently made into a film by Amazon Studios – and her second novel, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares, was released in 2017.
House of Hollow, her much-anticipated new YA, was published by Hot Key in April 2021 and shortlisted for the 2022 YA Book Prize. Her latest book, The Invocations, came out in February of 2024 with Hot Key Books.
Julie is an author and historian with a special interest in the Second World War. The Colonel: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai (Simon & Schuster 2005) was a biography of her grandfather. Stranger in the House was published in September 2008 by Simon & Schuster and looked at the impact of men returning from the war on family life. When the Children Came Home (Simon & Schuster, 2012) about evacuees attracted 5 star reviews. Jambusters (Simon & Schuster, 2013), a history of the Women’s Institute in WW2, was the inspiration for ITV’s highly successful drama series Home Fires. Subsequently, Julie published Fashion on the Ration (Profile, 2015) in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum for their major exhibition in 2015-16 and Our Uninvited Guests (Simon & Schuster, 2018), which examines the secret lives of some of Britain’s country houses during the war.
Dressed for War, a biography of the wartime editor of Vogue, Audrey Withers (Simon & Schuster, 2020) is in development with Gaumont TV as a drama series.
Her latest book British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon was published to enormous excitement in October 2024 by Weidenfeld.
Lauren St John grew up surrounded by horses, cats, dogs and a pet giraffe on a farm and game reserve in Zimbabwe and became a prolific writer, publishing over 25 books. Her childhood in Africa inspired her bestselling Animal Healer series (Orion, 2006-2015) and One Dollar Horse series (Orion, 2012-2014), as well as her memoir, Rainbow’s End (Simon and Schuester, 2007). The Snow Angel (Head of Zeus, 2017), a stand-alone children’s novel, is also partly set in Africa. Dead Man’s Cove (Orion, 2010), the first in her Laura Marlin Mystery series, won the 2011 Blue Peter Book of the Year Award, and was followed by four more titles.
Her most recent work includes the Kat Wolfe Investigates trilogy, which concluded with Kat Wolfe on Thin Ice (Macmillan, 2021), and Wave Riders (Macmillan, 2021).
A passionate conservationist, Lauren is an Ambassador for the Born Free Foundation. When not writing or rescuing leopards, she is a full-time valet to her not in the least demanding Bengal cat, Max.
Marc Stears is the author of Demanding Democracy (Princeton, 2010), Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Out of the Ordinary: How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How It Can Again (Harvard University Press, 2021), which makes a passionate case that both the left and right have lost their faith in ordinary people and must learn to find it again. He was a senior advisor and chief speechwriter to Ed Miliband, the former leader of the British Labour Party, and now directs the UCL Policy Lab at University College London.
His latest book, England (Bloomsbury, 2024) is co-written with Tom Baldwin and takes us on a journey through seven myths that distort our ideas of England and where the country is heading. It was published on April 25th.
Paul Seabright is British Professor of Economics in the Industrial Economics Institute and the Toulouse School of Economics. His The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton University Press, 2004) was hailed as “brilliant” by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. The Wars of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to Present (Princeton University Press, 2012) was called “witty, informative and cogent” by Jonathan Rée for The Guardian.
His latest book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People, will be published by Princeton University Press this month. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.
A magical voice in gardening, Katherine’s The Morville Hours, a delicious book about the house and garden where she lives in Shropshire set in the form of a Book of Hours, was published in 2008 by Bloomsbury and became a bestseller. She worked as a rare book librarian in Oxford and Dublin before moving to Shropshire and becoming a full-time gardener and writer in 1988. She was the gardening columnist of The Times for four years, writes widely in the gardening press and won the Garden Media Guild journalism Award in 2017. The garden she made at Morville, and the history, geology and wild life of the village, together with its human inhabitants, past and present, forms the backdrop to all her writing.
She has also written a follow-up, The Morville Year (Bloomsbury, 2012), and is working on a third volume.
Sue Stuart-Smith is a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist who completed a degree in English Literature at Cambridge before qualifying as a doctor. She worked in the NHS for many years, becoming the lead clinician for psychotherapy in Hertfordshire. She currently teaches at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London and is a consultant at DocHealth services.
She is married to Tom Stuart-Smith, the celebrated garden designer, and, over thirty years together, they have created the wonderful Barn Garden in Hertfordshire. Her book, The Well Gardened Mind (William Collins, 2020), analyses the relationship between gardening and mental health and was a Sunday Times Bestseller, listed as one of the 37 best books of 2020 by The Times and gardening book of the year by The Sunday Times. Stephen Fry called it ‘the wisest book I’ve read for many years’.
Familiar to many as author of the Penguin Classic Hedgerow Cookery and co-presenter of BBC Two’s Discovering Hedgerows, Rosamond Richardson (1945-2017) published several books on the countryside. She was also a regular contributor to The Countryman and wrote a monthly ‘Reflections’ page for Britain’s biggest-selling bird magazine Bird Watching. Her final book, Waiting for the Albino Dunnock, published in 2017.
Edward is a freelance writer and editor who specialises in business and finance and contributes regularly to publications such as the Financial Times, New Statesman and The Banker. Quercus published his first book 50 Management Ideas You Really Need to Know (2008), which aims to demystify many of the business theories and buzzwords that the ‘man in the street’ may have heard of but find puzzling. The House of Money (Atlantic Books, 2014) traces the history of banking through the stories of the great banking families, starting with Medici.
Penny Rudge’s blackly comic first novel Foolish Lessons in Life and Love, published by Little, Brown (2010), is set in contemporary London, where 23-year-old Taras Krohe is wedged between the two women in his life: Katya, his Russian girlfriend, who is struggling to fund her way through college, and Mami, his overbearing Bukovinian mother. Bumbling through the conflict this produces with increasing desperation, Taras finds it harder and harder to hold on to his image of himself as the good guy.
Penny is working on her second novel, Kindness is a Language, a love story about a deafblind girl thrown into contact with the three boys from a neighbouring family, thus discovering what’s different about the way she experiences the world.
