Claire Mitchell KC is a Scottish advocate specialising in appellate law, with a particular focus on constitutional issues, human rights, and sentencing. She has been involved in significant cases before the Privy Council and Supreme Court, shaping key aspects of Scottish law. She regularly provides legal training and has received recognition for her contributions to legal thought, including a Special Recognition Award at the 2013 Law Awards of Scotland.
She leads theWitches of Scotland campaign with Zoe Venditozzi, and in 2022, Claire and Zoe were made Doctors of Laws by the University of Dundee in recognition of their work.
Through their tireless campaigning, regular public appearances, and highly entertaining podcast of the same name, this pair of ‘quarrelsome dames’ are currently working to build a lasting memorial to the murdered women, and campaign to draw attention to the continued persecution of women as witches around the world today.
How To Kill A Witch was published by Monoray in the UK in May 2025.
Dr Liz Allan is an Australian writer and teacher living and working in the UK. Her debut novel, In Bloom, was chosen as one of the Observer’s Best Debut Novels of 2026 and she will be the 2026 Elisabeth Maynard Writer-in-Residence in New South Wales. Her writing has won the Newcastle Short Story Award and the Rachel Funari Prize for fiction, and her stories have been shortlisted and longlisted for numerous other awards.
Phuthuma Nhleko was until March 2011 the group CEO of MTN, at the time the sixth largest company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) by market capitalisation and the largest company with a primary listing in South Africa.
During his 10-year leadership tenure at MTN from 2002 to 2011, he transformed the company, driving its exponential growth through significant expansion covering 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East and serving over 240 million online customers. In May 2013, he returned as MTN Group Chairman and served until December 2019.
Nhleko’s previous directorships include BP Plc, Anglo American Plc, the Nedbank Group, Old Mutual SA, Johnnic Holdings, the Bidvest Group and Alexander Forbes. He holds a BSc in Civil Engineering from Ohio State University and a Master of Business Administration from Atlanta University (renamed Clark Atlanta University). He is a Fellow of University of Oxford, Blavatnik School of Government and Public Policy.
He is the Chairman and co-founder of Phembani Group a South African domiciled resource and energy-focused investment holding company that has a significant interest inter alia in downstream retailer Engen in partnership with Vitol, a Swiss-based Dutch multinational energy and commodity trading company. Phembani Group has JV partnerships with Glencore and Sibanye-Still Water in coal and platinum resources, respectively.
He is also the Chairman of Pembani Remgro Infrastructure Fund (PRIF) that invests in infrastructure projects on the African continent, Chairman of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), Director of IHS Towers and Chairman of Tullow Oil Plc.
Andrew Hui is a literary historian who traces the smallest turns of language to uncover the largest ideas.
The author of three books—The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries(Princeton 2025); A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter(Princeton, 2019, translated into five languages); and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature(Fordham, 2017), he explores the movement of knowledge—how ideas migrate, traditions rupture, and new forms emerge.
After earning his PhD from Princeton, Hui held fellowships at the Warburg Institute in London, Villa I Tatti in Florence, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He taught for three years at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow, and from 2012 to 2025, was one of the inaugural faculty members at Yale-NUS College (now defunct). He currently teaches at National University of Singapore, where he is at work on The Emperor’s Maze: the Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global Age.
As an Asian American teaching the European classics in Asia, he has devoted his life to studying the languages and cultures of both worlds.
Non is a writer, garden designer and wildflower hunter. She writes extensively and imaginatively on gardens and plants. She is Contributing Editor at House & Garden, writes regularly for Country Life and has a monthly column for The English Garden, taking over in 2021 from Katherine Swift (The Morville Hours). She has contributed to Gardens Illustrated, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Spectator Online.
As a designer, her emphasis is on using plants to create atmosphere. As well as private gardens in London, Suffolk, Sussex and Oxfordshire, public projects include the Fox Garden at the South London Gallery, the Church of St Mary the Boltons in South Kensington and currently the Leach Pottery in St Ives.
Based in London but frequently travelling in search of wonder, wildness and astonishingly flowery places, her first book Flora Alpina, The Wild Romance of Mountain Flowerswill be published in 2027.
Emily is interested in how children are cared for, and who by. Her first book, Saving the Children (UCP, 2021), was shortlisted for the RHS Whitbread Prize and Grace Abbott Book Prize. Now, she is working on a new project titled Love’s Labour: A History of Love and Work, which traces the story of infant care from Victorian baby farms to modern day nursery schools. Her writing on childcare, child rights and contemporary welfare states can be found in Jacobin, Tribune, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Emily has worked and studied at universities across the world, including in New York, Florence and Cape Town, and is now a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sheffield. She has also collaborated extensively with the humanitarian sector, teaching history to aid workers and helping modern NGOs grapple with the legacies of their colonial pasts. She’s the chairperson of a community playschool in Sheffield
Richard Armitage is a multi-award winning stage and screen actor best known for his role in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit Trilogy, Captain America, Alice through the Looking Glass, Into the Storm and Oceans 8. In 2022-25, he starred in four of Netflix’s Harlan Coben adaptations and also starred in Obsession for Netflix. For ITV he played Matthew Nolan in the smash hit ‘Red Eye’ and is starring in and Executive Producing an adaptation of a French TV show ‘Balthazar’ about a forensic pathologist for ITV in 2026.
His theatre credits include “Love Love Love” directed by Michael Mayer on Broadway, ‘Uncle Vanya’ directed by Ian Rickson and Yael Farber’s staging of “The Crucible”, in London which earned
him an Olivier Award nomination. He will return to the stage in London in 2026 in a new production directed by Yael Farber
He is the author of the British Book Awards-shortlisted Geneva(an instant Audible number 1) now in development for tv adaptation with Sony UK and of The Cut, also in development with Jed Mercurio at HTM. The novel was published in hardback by Faber (UK) and Pegasus (US) in August ‘25.
Zoe Venditozziis a novelist and writer living and working in Scotland. Zoe was born in Lancashireand grew up in a small village in North East Fife and studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Dundee. She won theGuardian’s “Not the Booker” prize in 2013 with her first novel Anywhere’s Better Than Here. She leads theWitches of Scotland campaign with Claire Mitchell KC, and in 2022, Claire and Zoe were made Doctors of Laws by the University of Dundee in recognition of their work.
Through their tireless campaigning, regular public appearances, and highly entertaining podcast of the same name, this pair of ‘quarrelsome dames’ are currently working to build a lasting memorial to the murdered women, and campaign to draw attention to the continued persecution of women as witches around the world today.
How To Kill A Witch was published by Monoray in the UK in May 2025.
Alex Kaiserman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He works on questions at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics; for example, questions which explore the connections between causation and responsibility, possibility and free will, or time and punishment.
Alex’s first book, How to Get Back to the Future, will be published in the UK by Viking Press. It traces the history of philosophical thinking about time travel from its origins in 19th-Century utopian fantasy, through the pulp fiction magazines of the 20s and 30s, right up to cutting-edge developments in metaphysics and tense logic, in search of answers to the questions at the heart of all time travel stories: Could a time-traveller change the past? For that matter, could they change the future? What would happen if they tried? What would happen if they succeeded?
Caroline is a historian, curator and broadcaster specialising in the arts of early modern Europe with a particular focus on decorative arts, women’s lives and the history of collecting. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds and is currently Lecturer in French and British History of Art, c.1650-1900 at the University of Edinburgh.
Previously, Caroline was Curator of Ceramics and Glass 1600-1800 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Curator of The Chitra Collection, London. She is especially passionate about making art and its histories accessible to all and regularly collaborates with museums and schools on public engagement projects.
Caroline frequently contributes as a consultant and expert for exhibitions, radio and television, most recently for BBC Scotland, BBC Radio 4 (Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time), and BBC History Extra. She has lectured at the Rijksmuseum, the Gardiner Museum, the Wallace Collection and the Scottish National Galleries. Her words have appeared in Apollo, Ceramic Review, BBC History Magazine and in numerous scholarly journals. She has authored two academic monographs; the firstLady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collectorwith Lund Humphries (September, 2025), and the second entitled Sèvres-Mania: The Craft of Ceramics Connoisseurship with Bloomsbury Academic (Spring, 2026). She is currently working on her first trade book.
