Tony Pollard is an academic and broadcaster. He is Professor of Conflict History and Archaeology at the University of Glasgow and has carried out pioneering archaeological investigations across the globe and as a forensic archaeologist has worked with police forces in the UK.
Whether he’s writing academic papers or books for a wider audience his passion lies in storytelling. His first novel, The Secrets of the Lazarus Club was published by Penguin in 2008, and when marking essays comes to an end, he looks forward to writing more fiction.
He is a familiar face on television, and since popularising battlefield archaeology with the BBC series Two Men in a Trench has gone on to make regular appearances in history shows like Nazi Megastructures and Defending Europe.
Rt Hon. Lord Patten of Barnes CH was Chancellor of Oxford University. As a British MP (1979-92) he served as Minister for Overseas Development, Secretary of State for the Environment and Chairman of the Conservative Party, being described afterwards as ‘the best Tory Prime Minister we never had’ (Observer). He is well known for being the last Governor of Hong Kong (1992-7), about which he wrote in East and West(Times Books, 1998). Both that and his subsequent, Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths about World Affairs(Allen Lane, 2005), were No. 1 international bestsellers. In 2008 he wrote What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (Allen Lane), and then First Confession: A Sort of Memoir (Allen Lane) in 2017. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1998 and a life peer in 2005.
Photo courtesy of Stuart Simpson / Penguin Random House
Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, and Director of Oracy Cambridge: the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication. He is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Before Cambridge, he was Professor of Language and Communications at the Open University. As a psychologist whose research has focused on the development of children’s spoken language and reasoning abilities, and teachers’ role in that development, he has worked extensively and internationally with teachers, researchers and educational policy makers.
In 2019 he was given the Oeuvre Award by the European Association for Research into Learning and Instruction for outstanding contributions to educational research; and for similar reasons in 2021 he was awarded the John Nisbet Fellowship by the British Educational Research Association.
Ciarán McMenamin was born in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in 1975. A graduate of the RSAMD, he has worked for the past twenty years as an actor in film, television and theatre. His acclaimed first novel, Skintown (Doubleday, 2017), was a WHSmith Fresh talent pick, and his second novel The Sunken Road (Vintage, 2021) was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. Both have been adapted for the screen by Ciarán himself and will go into production in 2025.
Kevin Maher was born and brought up in Dublin, moving to London in 1994 to begin a career in journalism. He wrote for Guardian, the Observer and Time Out and was film editor of the Face until 2002, and before joining The Times where for the last seven years he has been a feature writer, critic and columnist — and is now Chief Film Critic.
He lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and three children. The Fields(Little, Brown, 2013) is Kevin’s first novel and was shortlisted for the 2014 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award.
His second novel, Last Night on Earth, was published in April 2015 by Little, Brown.
Duncan Mackay is an archaeologist with a love of landscape and stories. He believes that every place, indoors or out, urban, rural or wild, has its own link with the past, and a unique tale to tell.
Duncan worked in archaeology for nearly two decades, predominantly with the University of Cambridge Archaeological Unit. He left full-time work to be a stay-at-home dad and pursue his own research.
He lives in Norfolk with his wife, son and soppy Black Labrador, indulging his passion for walking marshes and deserted beaches, and hurling himself into freezing rivers at dawn. He likes hares. And hedgehogs.
Echolands: A Journey in Search of Boudica (Hodder, 2023) is his first solo book.
Rebecca Loncraine was born in England and grew up on a hill farm in the Black Mountains of Wales. After attending art school, she studied history and literature, and wrote a doctorate in English literature at Oxford University. A career as a freelance writer followed, with Beccy writing for the national press.
Research for her first book, The Real Wizard Of Oz: The Life And Times Of L. Frank Baum (Gotham Books, 2009) was funded by fellowship grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.
Beccy died of cancer in 2016, leaving the typescript of her memoir, Skybound, as a work-in-progress. Skybound tells of Beccy’s life-changing and post-cancer healing-experience of learning to fly gliders in the Black Mountains of Wales and in New Zealand – a story of travel, survival, love and flying; where Eat, Pray, Love meets Jay Griffiths’s Wild.
Thanks to a thoughtful and emotional collaboration between Beccy’s remarkable parents Trisha & Tony, and her editor Sophie Jonathan, the book has been completed from the partial typescript and the notes and draft pages which Beccy left. It was published posthumously in 2018 by Picador.
Matt Lewis was born in 1974 in Bristol, England. He studied Marine Biology at University in Bangor, Wales, and then Aberdeen, Scotland. The Sudur Havid was his first deployment as a Scientific Observer – he went on to complete another deployment (without sinking) before moving on to a warmer, drier career. A decade and a half’s work in biology has taken Matt from Sabah to South Georgia to Canada to Kenya, allowing him to climb mountains, visit hospitals with rare tropical diseases, and learn to swear in Afrikaans.
He now lives in Aberdeen with his wife and two children, and runs his own business taking tropical bugs and reptiles into schools to encourage children to be interested in wildlife and conservation.
Joshua Levine is an historian and author of bestselling history, including the Sunday Times and New York Times #1 bestseller, Dunkirk (William Collins, 2017), On a Wing and a Prayer(William Collins, 2008) telling the story of aerial combat in the Great War, a prize-winning history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Beauty & Atrocity (William Collins, 2010), Operation Fortitude (William Collins, 2011), The Secret History of the Blitz (Simon & Schuster, 2015) and the authorised Illustrated History of the SAS (William Collins, 2023), written with full cooperation of the regiment and with full and exclusive access to its archives.
Joshua practised as a barrister for several years before becoming an actor and a writer. His plays have been performed on the London stage and on BBC Radio 4, and he has scripted a television documentary about eighteenth-century London for BBC2. He was the primary researcher for the television productions Forgotten Voices Of The Great War and Forgotten Voices Of The Second World War.
Joshua regularly acts as an Historical Consultant on feature films and dramas — on Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and most recently on Steve McQueen’s Blitz. He is at work on a new book: The End of the Beginning, a history of the North Africa campaign and the birth of the UK/US special relationship in the Second World War.
Thomas Leveritt is half-American, half-British. He is a novelist and screenwriter. His first novel, The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money (Vintage, 2008), was hailed as ‘dazzling’ by the Guardian and won both a Betty Trask Award for a first novel and a Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors. He is also an award winning artist.
