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.

A former Catholic nun, Karen emerged as a writer with her memoir Through the Narrow Gate describing her convent life. Her brilliant The Spiral Staircase takes Karen from the convent into the world. Now an international bestselling author – she is published in 40 languages – Karen’s books which include A History of God, Islam and The Battle for God have become required reading for those wishing to understand militant piety. The Great Transformation, about the beginnings of religious traditions, was a bestseller. Muhammad has sold for twenty five years. The Case for God – What Religion Means was a bestseller. In 2008 she won a TED Award which launched The Charter for Compassion and led to her book Twelve Steps to the Compassionate Life – a New York Times Bestseller. Bodley Head and Knopf published her book on religion and violence, called Fields of Blood, in November 2014.

Her newest book, Sacred Nature: How We Can Recover Our Bond With The Natural World, was published by The Bodley Head in June 2022. It will speak to anyone worried about the destruction of our environment and searches for new ways of thinking to accompany the political action needed to save our planet.

Richard is a former management consultant, entrepreneur, investor, and author. He has helped to start, rescue, and fund many outstandingly successful companies including Filofax, Plymouth Gin, Betfair, and Auto1, and LEK Consulting. Koch has authored or co-authored around 25 books dealing with business ideas and personal success.

In 1997, The 80/20 Principle (Currency Books) pioneered a reinterpretation of the so-called “Pareto Rule” – extending the idea that most worthwhile results come from a small minority of effort from business, where it was well known, to include personal life and careers. The book, substantially updated in 2007, has become a business classic, being named by GQ as one of the top 25 business books of all time. It has sold over one million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2016, Richard and Greg Lockwood published Simplify to great acclaim. Reviews included the phrases ‘Richard’s magnum opus’, ‘another masterpiece’, and ‘Simplify is genius.’

His most recent book, Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It, was published by Piatkus Books in 2020.

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 (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and African American Exploration in West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2003). 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. The Washing Post described it  as  a ‘superb new cultural history masquerading as an adventure tale’.

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.

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 (HarperCollins). 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.

Photo courtesy of Marc Lieberman