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

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Professor Lipscomb is an award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster. She is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Roehampton, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a columnist for History Today. Suzannah was formerly a Research Curator at Hampton Court Palace, and has won awards for her work in the heritage sector, including as Creative Director of the National Trust’s recent exhibition at Hardwick Hall, “We Are Bess”. In 2020, she was Chair of Judges of the Costa Book of the Year Award, and since 2020 has been a Trustee of the Mary Rose Trust.

Suzannah is the author of five books on the sixteenth century. She published her first book 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII in 2009 (Lion Hudson), followed by A Visitor’s Companion in Tudor England (Ebury; 2012; Pegasus, 2013), The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII (Head of Zeus, 2015; Pegasus, 2016), and Witchcraft (Penguin Ladybird, 2018). Her most recent book is The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc (2019) for Oxford University Press, which was described as ‘captivating’ by the Times Literary Supplement. The Social History Society Book Prize awarded The Voices of Nîmes a Special Commendation. With Helen Carr, she edited What is History, Now? (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021). For this, Suzannah co-wrote the introduction and contributed an essay called ‘How can we recover the lost lives of women?’.

Suzannah is also a well-established television presenter, having presented 18 history documentary series on the BBC, ITV, and other channels. She is the writer and presenter of the chart-topping podcast, Not Just the Tudors, from History Hit. It had 1.5 million downloads in its first six months. The Financial Times has described Suzannah as “a fluent broadcaster with mass appeal whose academic work exemplifies scholarly rigour.”

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James Kynge is the FT‘s global China editor, based in Hong Kong. He has covered many of the events that have helped shape the region, including China’s reforms of the early 1980s, the Japanese bubble and its deflation, the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, and the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. He was previously Beijng correspondent of the Financial Times when he wrote his bestselling China Shakes the World (W&N, 2019), which showed how the convulsive changes underway in China affected the wider world. It won the FT/Goldmann Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and has been translated into 19 languages. He is the recipient of many journalistic awards and won the 2017 Wincott Award for Business Journalism.

Anna Machin is world-renowned for her pioneering work exploring the science and anthropology of fatherhood and her cross-disciplinary interpretation of human love. She is a Visiting Academic at Oxford Brookes University and is passionate about passing on the results of her research to the public.

Her first book, The Life of Dad: The Making of the Modern Father, in which she explores what happens to a man when he becomes a father, biologically, psychologically and behaviourally, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2018.

Her new book, Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in January 2022.

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Helena Kelly grew up in North Kent, just down the road from where Charles Dickens used to live. She’s written academic articles and set Oxford University finals examinations on Jane Austen’s novels and has taught courses on Austen to hundreds of people, of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. Twenty years after she first picked up Pride and Prejudice, she is still discovering new things about her favourite author. She lives in Oxford with her husband and son.

Her first book, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (2016), was published to considerable acclaim by Icon in the UK and Knopf in the US, with the Observer describing it as ‘a sublime piece of literary detective work’. Brilliantly original, it introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution; to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects – feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution – at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason.

Her new book, The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens, was published in 2023 by Icon. Helena retells Dickens’ story from his childhood to his deathbed, uncovers the truths he tried to keep hidden, and offers a fresh – and deeply troubling – perspective on the man who remains one of Britain’s best-known novelists.

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Robert Hutton is the former UK political correspondent for Bloomberg News. He now works as a regular sketchwriter for The Critic. His first book, Romps, Tots and Boffins (Elliott & Thompson, 2013), was a satirical examination of the words only journalists use. Next came Would They Lie to You? (Elliott & Thompson, 2014), about the way politicians got around reality without actually uttering untruths. Both were shortlisted for the Political Book of the Year awards.

Robert has also written a book about one of Britain’s greatest yet unknown secret agents, Agent Jack: The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter, was published in 2018/19 by W&N in the UK and St Martin’s Press in the US. The Guardian praised it as ‘deeply researched, often astounding’. His latest book, The Illusionist (Orion, 2024) tells for the first time the dazzling tale of how, at a pivotal moment in the war, British eccentricity and imagination combined to thwart the Nazis and save innumerable lives – on both sides.