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, Islamand The Battle for Godhave become required reading for those wishing to understand militant piety. The Great Transformation, about the beginnings of religious traditions, was a bestseller. Muhammadhas 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.
The greatest male ballet dancer of his generation, Carlos was the lead principal dancer at The Royal Ballet and now runs Acosta Danza in Cuba. He is an extraordinary writer. His memoir No Way Hometells the story of the eleventh child of a truck driver in the slums of Havana who was a delinquent and whose father put him into ballet school to get him off the streets. Published by HarperCollins UK, Scribners US and Schott in Germany, it was a huge success. YURI, the film based on the memoir, directed by Iciar Bollain and written by Paul Laverty, was released in September 2018.
Pig’s Foot, his vibrant first novel (translated by Frank Wynne), is a historical, set in a former slave community in Cuba. Bloomsbury published it as a Waterstones’ debut selection in 2013. He was awarded the CBE in the Queen’s 2014 New Year Honours List.
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’.
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.
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, Confessionswas 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.
