Serena is a historian, writer, and broadcaster specialising in histories of fashion, shopping, and women’s lives from the sixteenth century to the present day. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Warwick, and she is Associate Professor of Fashion History at De Montfort University, Leicester.
Her words have appeared in The Independent, History Today, and The Conversation and she is a regular expert contributor and consultant for radio and television. She writes and presents Fashion Through History, a digital media series produced by Our Media for English Heritage.
She is the author of two academic monographs, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century(Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and Labour of the Stitch: The Making and Remaking of Fashionable Georgian Dress (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and has edited volumes including Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe: Bodies, Gender, and Material Culture (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), Shopping and the Senses: A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption, 1800-1970 (Palgrave, 2022), Disseminating Dress: Britain’s Fashion Networks, 1600-1970 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Material Literacy in Eighteenth Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is currently working on her first trade book.
Priya Khanchandani is a writer, curator and broadcaster who grew up in Luton and lives in London. She studied modern languages at Cambridge University and design history at the Royal College of Art. She was a lawyer before becoming a critic and curator, most recently working as head of curatorial of the Design Museum. She has curated exhibitions on contemporary design at museum and biennials internationally and her writing has appeared in publications like the Guardian, the Financial Times, Frieze, Vogue and in books and anthologies. She studied creative writing at the Faber Academy following a serious illness and was selected for the Penguin Books’ WriteNow scheme.
Yasmin Khan is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford where she teaches Global and Imperial history. She was born in London, educated at Oxford, and has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and London. She is the author of The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, 2007), The Raj at War (Penguin, 2015) (also published in the US as India at War) and two novels, Edgware Road (Bloomsbury, 2002) and Overland(Bloomsbury, 2004). She has been long-listed for prizes including the Orwell Prize, the Authors’ Club of Great Britain First Novel Prize, the PEN Hesell-Tiltman, and has won the Gladstone Prize for history and a Royal Television society award.
Yasmin has presented television series including Back in Time for Birmingham (BBC2, 2022); Britain’s Greatest Dig (BBC2, 2020) and A Passage to Britain (BBC2, 2018) and regularly contributes to programmes including Who Do You Think You Are and Digging for Britain.
Raised in the west of England, C J Wray studied psychology before embarking on a portfolio career that has seen her selling kitchens, editing erotica, working as an amanuensis to an armed robber (reformed), and pretending to be a princess.
Marc Zao-Sanders is the CEO and co-founder of filtered.com, a learning tech company. He regularly writes about algorithms, learning and productivity in Scientific American, Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, as well as Filtered’s blog.
Marc’s article about Timeboxing in Harvard Business Review became popular immediately and has remained so ever since. Five years on, the article remains in HBR’s Most Popular collection. It has been selected for a compendium by Harvard Business Publishing, Developing Good Habits. The article was noticed and appropriated by a creator on TikTok who made a series of videos which collectively amassed 10 million views. Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time was published by Michael Joseph in the UK (2024), St Martin’s Press in the US, and has been translated into 30 languages.
Dominic Gregory is a volunteer crewman on one of the RNLI’s busiest channel stations. He is the author of Lifeboat At The End Of The World (Williams Collins, March 2026), described by the Telegraph as ‘unflinchingly candid and extraordinarily powerful’ and The Times as ‘crackling into blistering life’. It has also been reviewed in the Literary Review, which ‘defies anyone with a heart to read this account without wiping away a tear or two’ and was also ‘Book of the Week’ on BBC Radio 4.
Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall are a married couple who live in the wilds of East Devon. They share their house with two teenage daughters, two rabbits, a Labrador, and a rehabilitating common pipistrelle bat. They have also written a book together, Black Ops and Beaver Bombing: Adventures With Britain’s Wild Mammals(Oneworld, 2023).
Tim is Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of works of poetry and literary criticism and has made documentaries for the BBC as presenter and as executive producer. He edited Britain’s Mammals 2018 and is currently working on an edition of correspondence between William Golding and his editor, Charles Monteith, for Faber & Faber.
Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall are a married couple who live in the wilds of East Devon. They share their house with two teenage daughters, two rabbits, a Labrador, and a rehabilitating common pipistrelle bat. They have also written a book together, Black Ops and Beaver Bombing: Adventures With Britain’s Wild Mammals(Oneworld, 2023).
Fiona is Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Sussex. She is the founding Chair of Mammal Conservation Europe, author of the UK government’s official census of British mammals and of its internationally-sanctioned Red List, co-author of the State of Nature Reports in 2016 and 2019, lead editor on the new Atlas of Mammals of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. She advises the UK government and its devolved authorities on a variety of conservation issues. From 2015 to 2021 she served as Chair of the Mammal Society.
Her media appearances include the Radio 4’s Today Programme, Countryfile, the Guardian, Costing the Earth, and the Wall Street Journal, and many others.
Justin Cartwright’s novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet (Spectre, 1995), the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers (Spectre, 1998), the acclaimed White Lightning (Spectre, 2002), shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award, The Promise of Happiness (Thomas Dune, 2005), selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club and winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize, The Song Before It Is Sung (Bloomsbury, 2007), To Heaven By Water (Bloomsbury, 2009), Other People’s Money (Bloomsbury, 2011), winner of the Spears Novel of the Year, Lion Heart (Bloomsbury, 2013) and, most recently, the acclaimed Up Against the Night (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Joanna Trollope CBE has been writing for nearly fifty years and is one of our most acclaimed and beloved novelists – her work has attracted considerable critical acclaim as well as huge commercial success. Her novels have been translated into over twenty-five languages and several have been adapted for television. Joanna is the author of twenty-two highly acclaimed contemporary bestsellers, including Sense & Sensibility (2013), the lead title in HarperCollins’s Austen Project, and ten historical novels published under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey. An accomplished short story writer and occasional magazine contributor, Joanna also wrote a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters (Pimlico, 2006), and edited a widely praised anthology of rural life, The Country Habit (Bantam, 1993).
Joanna was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List (for services to charity), and CBE in 2019, for services to literature, and was the Chair of Judges of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012.
