James Yorkston is one of the most celebrated artists in British contemporary music. Over the course of a 15-year career as a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, he’s recorded a series of acclaimed albums showcasing a balance of folk and contemporary roots, often drawing deeply on traditional songs and narrative heritage. As a popular live performer and an in-demand collaborator, James has toured continuously throughout the UK, the continent and North America, gaining a loyal and dedicated following among both fans and critics.
He’s been featured twice on BBC2’s The Culture Show and has been a Musical Director for the BBC Electric Proms. James is a regular performer at festivals such as Latitude, Bestival and Green Man. His non-fiction account of life on the road,It’s Lovely to Be Here: The Touring Diaries of a Scottish Gent, was published in 2011 by Domino/Faber. His most recent album, The Cellardyke Recording and Wassailing Society, was released to great critical acclaim last year. He is the author of the novels Three Craws (2016), The Book of the Gaels (2022) and Tommy the Bruce (2025).
Jasper Rees has been a journalist since 1988. He has written over the years for most broadsheets, but principally the Daily Telegraph, Independent, Evening Standard and The Times Saturday Magazine. He has also written for Vogue, Harper’s, Radio Times and GQ. He lives in London.
Liam McIlvanney was born in Scotland and studied at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. He has written for numerous publications, including the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book, Burns the Radical (Tuckwell Press, 2002), won the Saltire First Book Award. He has also won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel for Where the Dead Men Go (Faber, 2014) and the Bloody Sunday McIlvanney Prize for The Quaker (HarperCollins, 2018).
He is Stuart Professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
He splits his time between Dunedin and Scotland with his wife and four sons.
James Rebanks is a farmer and writer based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. His No.1 bestselling debut, The Shepherd’s Life (Allen Lane, 2015), won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages, and was described in the Independent as ‘an unforgettable book, one that raises important questions. It is also one of the most truthful descriptions of contemporary rural life that I have read’.
His second book, English Pastoral (Allen Lane, 2020), was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. Heralded as a ‘masterpiece’ by the New Statesman, it won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and was named Fortnum and Mason Food Book of the Year; it was also shortlisted for the Orwell and Ondaatje prizes, and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio award.
His latest book is The Place of Tides, already hailed by George Saunders as ‘Not only a modern classic, but one we very much need right now’, was published by Allen Lane in October 2024.
Helen Rebanks was born and raised on a farm in the English Lake District. Her family have been farming for many generations. Her parents kept dairy cows, beef cattle and sheep and her grandfather bred pedigree Clydesdale horses. She has a first class honours degree in Fine Art and she worked in Oxford before becoming a full-time farmer’s wife and mother to four children in Cumbria.
Helen runs the farm with her husband James who is also an author. Together they keep Belted Galloway cattle and Herdwick Sheep on their farm near Ullswater.
Helen and James are passionate advocates for the future of family farms and share their knowledge about regenerative farming methods at international events, and on courses they run at their farm.
Helen regularly cooks for groups that visit the farm using homegrown ingredients and local produce.
The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days, published by Faber in the UK and HarperHorizon in the US, is her first book.
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet and essayist. They are originally from New Mexico and currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. They are a 2023 Obsidian Foundation Fellow and were selected as a runner-up for The Missouri Review’s 2022 Poem of the Year Award. Their work has appeared in Guernica, fourteen poems, The Stinging Fly, London Magazine, Adroit, and elsewhere. Their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story, published by Banshee Press, has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024.
Ben Martynoga is a biologist and award-winning science writer. He has a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford and a PhD in neurobiology from the University of Edinburgh, and he has worked at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai and the National Institute for Medical Research and the Francis Crick Institute, both in London.
After a decade at the leading edge of neuroscience and genome research, he swapped his white coat for a pen. In 2023 he launched the award-winning Explodapediabook series, introducing young readers to biology’s biggest ideas. One of the books in the series, The Gene, was awarded the Association of Science Educators ‘Book of The Year’ in 2023. His writing on science, nature and the environment appears in the Guardian, New Statesman, the Financial Times and beyond. An engaging speaker, he shares his passion for science and its impacts with audiences of all ages.
Ben is currently at work on his first book for adults, No Small Matter: The New Science and Unseen Power of the Earth’s Microbiome. He lives, works, wanders and wonders in the Lake District.
Emma Chapman is a British writer, currently living in North Yorkshire. She was born in 1985 and grew up near Manchester. She studied English Literature at Edinburgh University, and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.
Since leaving university, she has lived in London, Western Australia and Indonesia. In 2013, her first novel, How To Be A Good Wife, was published by Picador to critical acclaim, with reviews in The Guardian, The Financial Times, and The New York Times, amongst others. It was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was chosen as a Target Book Club title. It sold in nine territories. Hilary Mantel called it ‘an impressive debut from a writer who shows insight and power’.
Her second novel,The Last Photograph, about a British photojournalist’s experiences during the Vietnam War, was published in 2016, also by Picador.
Simon Parker is a British travel writer, author, filmmaker, public speaker and broadcast journalist; and has reported from over 100 countries in the past decade – from Bhutan and French Polynesia to Hawaii and Namibia, via Svalbard, Greenland and Saint Helena.
In 2016, he sailed and cycled from China to London in 133 days, for a Telegraph series and BBC World Service documentary. His award-winning TV travel series, Earth Cycle, has been distributed in 20+ countries globally and can be found on Amazon Prime, FOX Australia and YouTube.
His first book, Riding Out, (Summersdale, 2022) charts a 3,427 mile journey around “Pandemic Britain”, and his latest book, A Ride Across America (September, 2024) was published this July. Frustrated by the shallow headlines focusing only on Trump, guns and divisions, Simon decided that to better understand the USA he would have to travel across it, slowly.
Moso Sematlane is a writer and filmmaker based in Maseru, Lesotho. He has previously been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as the Gerald Kraak Award. He won the Stinging Fly’s FBA Fiction Prize in 2024 for his short story A Fern Between Rocks. He is currently working on his first short story collection.
