Dr Mark Avery writes mostly on birds, their biology and their conservation. He worked for the RSPB for 25 years – first as a scientist but for nearly 13 years as Conservation Director. In 2011 he left the RSPB to go freelance. He writes a daily blog on UK nature conservation issues and regularly for British Wildlife, BBC Wildlife and Birdwatch magazines. He lives in rural Northamptonshire.

Jonny edited Karl Bushby’s diary, Giant Steps: The Remarkable Story of the Goliath Expedition from Punta Arenas to Russia (Sphere, 2007). He writes for the Daily Telegraph and a number of other publications, primarily about the countryside. He also does a rather fine line in recycled fur hats.

Johnny is the author of several books including Preserved (Kyle Cathie, 2005) and The Man Who Touched the Sky (Hodder, 2002), which was described as ‘a fascinating and exhilarating read’ by Sir Richard Branson. He co-authored The Football Book with David Goldblatt. In 2012, he and David published How To Watch the Olympics (UK: Profile; US: Riverhead), which was an Observer, Independent and Independent on Sunday sports Book of the Year. In 2015, they published The Time Travel Handbook: From the Eruption of Vesuvius to the Woodstock Festival (UK: Profile; US: Harper Design).

Ben Ambridge is Professor of Psychology at the University of Manchester. His first book, Psy-Q: You Know Your IQ – Now Test Your Psychological Intelligence (Profile Books, 2015), was translated into fifteen languages worldwide, and was shortlisted in the Popular Science category for the British Medical Association book awards. His follow-up, Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee? (Profile Books, 2017) led to an appearance on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, while his TED talk on The Top 10 Myths of Psychology has been viewed over 2½ million times. Ben has written as a regular columnist for the Guardian/Observer and The Big Issue.

Ben’s latest book, The Stories of Your Life (Macmillan, 2024) shares fascinating lessons about the nature of humanity, the power of psychology and – most importantly – the way we see ourselves.

James Attlee is the author of Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (2007), Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight (2011), Station to Station: Searching for Stories on the Great Western Line (2015, shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year) and Guernica: Painting the End of the World (2017) among other titles, as well as numerous essays, chapters and newspaper articles, mainly concerning art and books. His digital fiction The Cartographer’s Confession, free to download from the App Store and Google Play, won the if: book New Media Writing Prize 2017. He has worked in publishing for over two decades, including 10 years at Tate Publishing in London.

John Batchelor is Emeritus Professor of English at Newcastle University and a former tutorial Fellow of New College Oxford. He has now returned to Oxford and is a member of the Senior Common Room at New College.

In a long writing career he has moved away from academic books to books for the general reader. His recent work includes The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Blackwell, 1995), John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life (Chatto & Windus, 2000), Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Chatto & Windus, 2006) and Tennyson: To Strive, To seek, To Find (Chatto & Windus, 2012). In May 2021, How the Just So Stories Were Made: The Brilliance and Tragedy Behind Kipling’s Celebrated Tales for Little Children was published by Yale University Press.

John Barton is a biblical scholar and was the Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford from 1991 to 2014. In addition to his academic career, he has been an ordained and serving priest in the Church of England since 1973, and has represented Oxford clergy on the Church’s General Synod. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Among his publications are Reading the Old Testament (John Knox Press, 1984, several subsequent editions), The Nature of Biblical Criticism (John Knox Press, 2007), Ethics in Ancient Israel (Oxford University Press, 2014), and  The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Companion (Princeton University Press, 2016). He is joint editor of The Oxford Bible Commentary, and editor-in-chief of a major online encyclopaedia, The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Religion. His books deal with the interpretation of the Bible, how it came together and became authoritative in Judaism and in the Church, and its theological and ethical themes—concentrating especially on the Old Testament.

His first trade book, A History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths, was published by Penguin in 2019 to widespread acclaim, becoming a Sunday Times bestseller and winning the Duff Cooper Prize. Since then, Barton has published The Word: On the Translation of the Bible (Allen Lane, 2022). Telling the story of how the Bible has been translated, this book is the product of a lifetime’s study of scripture and was praised as “immensely scholarly, well written and sprinkled with light touches” by the Literary Review.