Alysa read Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford, and is now a professional historian and Reader at Oxford Brookes University. She has written several academic books on the history of child health and. Her first trade book, Cake: A Slice of History – a lively examination of cake and what it can tell us about ourselves and our past – was published by Headline in the UK and Pegasus in the US in 2016. She lives in Leamington Spa.

Phyllida is a well-known actress whose first book Notes to My Mother-in-Law sold at auction to Fourth Estate (2009). Her second book How Many Camels Are There in Holland is an amusing account of her relationship with her mother who had Alzheimer’s. The book was published by Fourth Estate in spring 2013. The Omnibus edition Three Mothers (and a Camel) combining both volumes was published on Mother’s Day 2014.

Her memoir covering the earlier years of her acting career, Dead Now of Course, was published in 2017 (Fourth Estate). Filled with funny, charming anecdotes, it paints a fascinating picture of life in the theatre.

Sir John Lister-Kaye is one of Scotland’s best-known naturalists and conservationists. John came to live in the Highlands of Scotland in 1968 to work with the celebrated author and naturalist, Gavin Maxwell, of Ring of Bright Water fame. After Maxwell’s sudden death in 1969, John decided to commemorate Gavin’s work and writing by finishing the story of the Maxwell otters. This first book, published in 1972, is called The White Island.

The success of this book led to the creation of the first Field Studies Centre for the Highlands and Islands.  Since then, over 25,000 adults and 100,000 children have passed through the welcoming doors of Aigas Field Centre. In recent years the environmental education for schools programme independently run by the Aigas Trust (set up by John in 1980) has become the Highlands’ principal provider, handling some 5,000 school children every year.

In his bestseller, Song of the Rolling Earth (Little, Brown, 2003) now in its 10th reprint, and its sequel, Nature’s Child (Little, Brown, 2004), John celebrates his passion for nature and wildlife.  These books have been widely acclaimed; they were followed in 2010 by At The Water’s Edge (Canongate) and by Gods of the Morning (Canongate, 2015).

In 2001 John was awarded an OBE for services to nature conservation, and he has received honorary doctorates from two Scottish universities for his contribution to nature writing. In 2016 he was awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Geddes Award for services to conservation, and made an honorary FRSGS.

John’s latest book, The Dun Cow Rib (Canongate, 2017), is a memoir of his boyhood and was shortlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2018. Later that year, John received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the RSPB’s Nature of Scotland’s Awards in Edinburgh. ‘No one writes more movingly, or with such transporting poetic skill’— Helen MacDonald.

His latest book Footprints in the Woods (Canongate, 2023) is an account of a year spent observing the comings and goings of otters, beavers, badgers, weasels and pine martens. This family – Mustelidae – all live in the wild at Aigas, the conservation and field study centre John calls home. With the patient and meticulous care of a true naturalist, John observes and records the lives, habits and habitats of these elusive animals.

Lucy is a journalist and author, specialising in popular history books for adults and children. She has written for the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and the TLS. She has been the Literary Editor of the Tablet and the London correspondent for Art News in New York. Lucy lives in London and is an RLF Fellow.

Her first foray into writing books was a biographical study for nine to eleven-year-olds of the 19th-century computer wizard Ava Lovelace, which won the 2002 Blue Peter prize for non-fiction. 2013 saw the publication of her first book for adults, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain, which was published by Bloomsbury to rave reviews in every newspaper. Norton published in the US in 2014.

Lucy’s latest book, Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves, was published by Bloomsbury in summer 2022 to immediate critical acclaim. Writing for The Sunday Times, Dominic Sandbrook said: “in six gloriously colourful chapters, she explores everything from guidebooks to souvenirs, retelling these first tourists’ tales with gleeful relish. Lethbridge’s research is so wide, her panorama so colourful, that no review can do more than scratch the surface”.

Photo courtesy of Kiloran Howard

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of Church History at Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, and prize-winning author, has written extensively on the sixteenth century and beyond it. This brilliant historian’s Thomas Cranmer (Yale University Press, 1997) won the Duff Cooper Prize and Whitbread Biography Awards. Penguin UK and US published Reformation (2003), which won the NBCC Award in New York, the Wolfson History Prize, the British Academy Prize and sold internationally. His bestselling A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Allen Lane) and the BBC TV series based on it first appeared in 2009; the book won the Cundill Prize, the world’s largest prize for history, in 2010.

His three-part TV series for BBC2, How God made the English, aired in March 2012, and his BBC2 series, Sex and the Church, aired in early 2015. He has written Silence: a Christian History (2013) and his collected essays on the Reformation appeared as All Things New: Writings on the Reformation in 2016. Both were published with Penguin Press in the UK and with Viking in the US. His major biography, Thomas Cromwell: A Life (Penguin Press), appeared in 2018. He was knighted in the UK New Year’s Honours List of 2012. Professor MacCulloch is a Fellow of The British Academy,  the Royal Historical Society and of the  Society of Antiquaries of London.

His latest book, Lower Than The Angels (Allen Lane, 2024) seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a 3000-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. Its message is simple, necessary and timely: to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity

Photo courtesy of Chris Gibbions