Reni Eddo-Lodge is a London-based, award-winning journalist. She has written for the New York Times, the Voice, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Stylist, Inside Housing, the Pool, Dazed and Confused, and the New Humanist. She is the winner of a Women of the World Bold Moves Award, an MHP 30 to Watch Award and was chosen as one of the Top 30 Young People in Digital Media by the Guardian in 2014. She has also been listed in Elle‘s 100 Inspirational Women list, and The Root‘s 30 Black Viral Voices Under 30.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (Bloomsbury, 2017) is her first book. It won the 2018 Jhalak Prize, was chosen as Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year and Blackwell’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year, was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize and shortlisted for the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Non-Fiction. In 2020, she became the first Black-British author since records began to top the overall Nielsen charts, and in 2021 she received a Nielsen Gold Bestseller Award for sales surpassing 500,000.

Five years on from its initial publication, Bloomsbury have published a new and updated version of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, marking the milestone of more than a million copies sold across editions. In this newly updated edition, Eddo-Lodge reflects on the seismic changes of 2020, the movement the book came from, the movement it helped fuel and the people it connected.

Photo courtesy of Amaal Said

David Farrier teaches English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His first book, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looks for the marks and traces we are leaving upon the Earth for future generations to discover, from chicken bones and plastic waste, to deep earth nuclear storage facilities designed to remain secure for the next 100,000 years. Footprints was sold at auction to Fourth Estate in the UK and FSG in the US.

The proposal won the inaugural Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award. David was an adviser on ‘Deep Time,’ the 2016 Edinburgh International Festival opening event, which told the 350 million-year-old story of the formation of Edinburgh, and recently held a prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of New South Wales. His work has appeared in Aeon and The Atlantic. Published in 2020, Footprints was both a Times and Telegraph Book of the Year.

His latest book, Nature’s Genius (Canongate, 2025) takes us on a profound journey into this ever-changing natural world. What we discover could transform us. The ways animals adjust to the urban landscape can help us design sustainable cities. Examining other intelligences can help us remake our economies. Learning from bacterial evolution may help solve our waste problem. Synthetic biology could rescue animals from the brink of extinction. Thinking in timescales of the natural world could help us choose a better future.

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Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford.  He is also Professor of Silk Roads Studies at King’s College, Cambridge.

He works on the history and politics of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia/Iran, Central Asia, China and beyond. Peter often writes for the international press, including The New York Times, Financial Times Guardian, and has a regular column in the London Evening Standard.

His translation of The Alexiad was published by Penguin Classics in 2009. The First Crusade: The Call from the East (Bodley Head/Vintage, 2012) was hailed as the ‘the most significant contribution to re-thinking the origins and causes of the First Crusade for a generation’ (TLS). It has since appeared in fifteen languages.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury, 2015), argues for a perspective of human history that centres the ‘silk roads’, the geographical region stretching from eastern Europe, across Central Asia and into China and India. It received worldwide acclaim, rising to #1 in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction charts and remaining in the Top 10 for nine months in a row, as well as being #1 in China, India and many other countries around the world. It has since been published in more than thirty languages and sold over 1.5 million copies. The Daily Telegraph described it as ‘breath-taking and addictively readable’, and the Berliner Zeitung hailed it as ‘not only the most important history book written for years, but the most important in decades’. In 2018, it was adapted and illustrated by Bloomsbury Children’s Books as The Silk Roads For Children.

Peter’s 2018 follow-up, The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World, continues the story of the Silk Roads into the present day, focusing particularly on the Belt and Road Initiative. It is a ‘masterly-mapping out of a new world order’ according to the Evening Standard, and won the Human Sciences prize of the Carical Foundation in 2019.

Peter’s latest book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury, 2023) is a major new work which reframes the longue durée of history from the dawn of time until the present day through the perspective of climatic and environmental changes. It has been called ‘a dazzling compendium of global research’ by The Spectator and ‘comprehensive, well informed and fascinating’ by The Times.

Peter is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Anthropological Society, the Royal Geographic Society and the Royal Society of Arts. He is a special advisor at the UN and a senior advisor to the World Bank. Prospect Magazine named Peter One of the World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019.

He has been called ‘the first great historian of the 21st century’ by the Brazilian press; ‘the history rock star du jour’ by The New Statesman, and simply ‘a rock-star historian’  (VLT – Sweden; Helsingin Sanomat – Finland). The Times has called him ‘a literary star.’

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Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. She is the author of The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici (2016), which was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2017 and was one of the Evening Standard‘s Best Books of 2016. Her first trade book, The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story from Inside the Vatican was published to wide acclaim by Bodley Head in 2012. Catherine was a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2015 and has contributed to a wide range of programmes for Radio 3 and 4 including Free Thinking and In Our Time. She advised on the 2014 BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

As of January 2020 Catherine is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University; prior to that she was Associate Professor in History and Heritage at Swansea University, and has held fellowships at the Institute of Historical Research, the British School at Rome and the European University Institute. Her new book, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance, released in March 2021, has been called ‘brilliant and gripping… the full true Renaissance in a history of compelling originality and freshness’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore and was a Times History Book of the Year. It was longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2021 and the Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown 2020.

Her latest book, Roads to Rome (Bodley Head, 2024) is based on outstanding original research, and brimming with life and drama, this is the first book to explore two thousand years of history through one of the greatest imperial networks ever built.

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Edmund was the Economist‘s Washington, Paris and Berlin correspondent and is a regular reviewer. His Liberalism: The Life of an Idea was published by Princeton in 2014.

The second in his planned political trilogy – Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition – was published in 2020, also by Princeton University Press. The Economist called it ‘an epic history of conservatism and the Financial Times praised Fawcett for creating a ‘rich and wide-ranging account’ that demonstrates how conservatism has repeated managed to renew itself.

The Financial Times journalist’s Jungle Capitalists: a Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution (2008) was published by Canongate in the UK and, as Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Grove in the US. The Observer said this about the book: ‘If you only read a handful of non-fiction books this year, Jungle Capitalists is among your recommended five portions’. His history of Lehman Brothers, The Last of the Imperious Rich, described as ‘thought-provoking and illuminating’ by the New York Times, was published by Penguin/Portfolio in Autumn 2010. Out of Time, a personal history of the England 1966 World Cup victory and ‘an exuberantly brilliant memoir’ (Adrian Chiles) was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Photo courtesy of Gabriel Louglin