Rebecca Abrams

Rebecca Abrams is an author, teacher and journalist. Her books include Touching Distance, The Jewish Journey, When Parents Die and Three Shoes One Sock & No Hairbrush. She is a long-standing teacher of Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and a regular literary critic for the Financial Times.
Matthew Stadlen

Matthew Stadlen is a radio and television presenter, producer and writer.
Jonathan Drori

Jonathan Drori CBE is a Trustee of both Cambridge and Oxford Botanic Gardens and Honorary Professor at Birmingham University’s Institute of Forest Research. Previously, he was a Trustee of the Eden Project and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and for BBC TV, was responsible for many science documentaries. He is known for his TED talks […]
Mike Leigh

Writer-director Mike Leigh trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Camberwell and Central Art Schools in London, and at the London Film School.
Carol Isaacs

Carol Isaacs is a musician and as The Surreal McCoy, a well-known cartoonist.
Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes is an award-winning author and historian, who has held teaching posts at Birkbeck College, University of London and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His entire life has been dedicated to the study of Russian history.
Norman Lebrecht

Norman Lebrecht is the author of fifteen works of non-fiction, including Genius and Anxiety, and the international bestsellers The Maestro Myth, Why Mahler? and The Life and Death of Classical Music, which have been translated into seventeen languages. His first novel, The Song of Names, is now an award-winning film. He writes a monthly essay […]
Simon May

Simon May was born in London, the son of a violinist and a brush manufacturer. Visiting professor of philosophy at King’s College London, his books include Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion; Love: A History; Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’; The Power of Cute; How to Be a Refugee; Jump! A New Philosophy […]
Ian Thomson

Ian Thomson was one of the last to interview Primo Levi, and the first to journey in his tracks as a biographer. He is an expert on Italian literature and has translated the Sicilian crime writer and essayist Leonardo Sciascia into English.
Robert Chandler

Among the writers Robert Chandler has translated from Russian are Vasily Grossman, Hamid Ismailov, Lev Ozerov, Andrey Platonov and Alexander Pushkin. He has also edited three anthologies of Russian literature for Penguin Classics and published poems in the New Criterion Poetry Review and the TLS.
Zoe Wannamaker

Zoe Wanamaker CBE is an award winning American-born British actress who has worked extensively in the theatre, television and film
Janet Suzman

Dame Janet Suzman DBE is a critically-acclaimed actor and director