James is a social anthropologist who has spent many years researching the sophisticated ecological knowledge of some of the poorest inhabitants of West and central Africa. In a longstanding research partnership with his wife, fellow anthropologist Melissa Leach, he has published many academic books ranging from the prize-winning Misreading the African Landscape to those on Vaccine Anxieties and African American Exploration in West Africa. He is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. His first trade book, The Captain and “the Cannibal”: An Epic Story of Exploration, Kidnapping and the Broadway Stage, telling the extraordinary true story of a nineteenth-century American sea captain and the Pacific islander he captured and brought back to New York to perform on Broadway, was published by Yale University Press in 2015. ‘[A] superb new cultural history masquerading as an adventure tale’ — Washington Post
Stanley Kenani is a Malawian writer, one of the winners of the SA PEN/HSBC Literary Award. He was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2008 & 2012. In August 2011, Random House Struik in South Africa published his first book, For Honour, a collection of 11 short stories which present the nation of Malawi as a theatre of the absurd, where minority groups such as gays and lesbians are oppressed, common people struggle with issues such as childlessness and major problems like marital rape and human trafficking are suffered in silence. Stanley is currently working on his first full-length novel, After Light.
Dr Nick Edwards is an A&E consultant whose first book, In Stitches, was published by HarperCollins in 2007 and has sold over 100,000 copies. He writes with shocking honesty and humour about what it’s really like to work in Accident & Emergency, from the ridiculous government targets, to the bizarre ‘accidents’, foreign bodies inserted in unusual places, and other peculiar goings on. Nick is currently writing the sequel for HarperCollins entitled Still in Stitches.
Dr Ben Daniels is author of Confessions of a GP, a witty insight into the life of a family doctor. Funny and moving in equal measure, it will change the way you look at your GP next time you pop in with the sniffles. Published by HarperCollins, Confessions was a no. 1 bestseller and became the bestselling eBook of 2011 with over 300,000 copies sold.
The sequel, Further Confessions of a GP, was published in December 2014. Film Rights have been optioned to Objective Fiction.
Francis Crick (1916-2004) was one of Britain’s greatest scientists. He is best known for his work with James Watson which led to the identification of the structure of DNA in 1953, drawing on the work of Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin and others. This discovery proved to be of enormous importance to biomedical research and earned Crick the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.
In 1981, Crick wrote Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, in which he suggested that life on Earth may have been seeded on another planet. His later book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994), explores the fundamental questions of human consciousness, challenging science, philosophy and religion.
