Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes a column twice weekly for the Guardian and weekly for the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC. Previously he wrote columns for the Times and the London Evening Standard, both of which newspapers he edited. His career began on Country Life magazine and continued on the Times Educational Supplement, the Economist (political editor) and the Sunday Times (books editor). He served on the board of British Rail and London Transport in the 80s and was deputy chairman of English Heritage and a Millennium commissioner. He was Journalist of the Year in 1988 and Columnist of the Year in 1993. His books include works on London architecture, the press and politics and, more recently, ‘Thatcher & Sons – A Revolution in Three Acts’ (2006) and ‘A Short History of England.’ (2011).

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Chad Harbach

Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin, and graduated from Harvard in 1997. He was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he received an MFA in Fiction in 2004. He is currently the Executive Editor of n+1, which he co-founded, and lives in Brooklyn. In 2012 he published The Art of Fielding, the heart-warming debut of the year that heralds the arrival of a major new American voice. “It's left a little hole in my life the way a really good book will.” – Jonathan Franzen.

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Frances Osborne

Frances Osborne is the author of two biographies and is about to publish ‘Park Lane,’ the first of two historical novels for her UK publishers, Virago. Her previous book was ‘The Bolter: Idina Sackville – the woman who scandalised 1920’s society and became White Mischief’s infamous seductress,’ published by Virago in the UK in May 2008, and published in the US by Knopf in June 2009, and Vintage paperback in May 2010. In the US it become a National Bestseller. It has also been listed as an O, Oprah Magazine Terrific Read of 2009, and was the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Book of the Year. In the UK, The Bolter was been selected for the Richard and Judy Bookclub, shortlisted for the Best Read in Britain prize, and has held the Number One position in several paperback non-fiction lists, including The Sunday Times, where it was in the Top Ten for almost three months. She lives between London and the Peak District National Park, with her husband and two children.
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Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels, a book of short stories and three works of non-fiction. A Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, he has received, among other honours, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), the Writers’ Guild Award, the James Tait Black Prize, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year Prizes in both Britain and Germany, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, the Crossword Book Award in India, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the London International Writers’ Award, the James Joyce award of University College Dublin, the St Louis Literary Prize, the Carl Sandburg Prize of the Chicago Public Library, and a U.S. National Arts Award. He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and University Distinguished Professor at Emory University. He has received the Freedom of the City in Mexico City, Strasbourg and El Paso, and the Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union. He holds the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres – France’s highest artistic honour. In June 2007 he received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2008 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library. In addition, Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker – the best winner in the award’s 40 year history – by a public vote. A film of Midnight’s Children, directed by Deepa Mehta, will be released in 2012, as well as an autobiographical memoir.
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David Gentleman

David Gentleman is a watercolourist, wood engraver and lithographer living in London. He has travelled widely and has written and illustrated books on Britain, London, Paris, India, Italy and Anglo-American relations. He first went to Italy as a student and has often returned. He has designed British postage stamps and a platform-length mural on the London Underground. There have been many exhibitions of his landscape watercolours and architectural lithographs; his posters have been carried on marches protesting against the wars in Iraq and Gaza. his most recent book is 'London, You're Beautiful' published by Penguin in May 2012.
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William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple is an award winning historian as well as a broadcaster, critic and art historian. In 1986, while still at college, he set off to follow on foot the outward route of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia and wrote a highly acclaimed bestseller about the journey, ‘In Xanadu,’ when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award. He followed this up with ‘City of Djinns’ (1994), ‘From the Holy Mountain’ (1997) and ‘The age of Kali’ (1998). In 1999 he changed genres and began writing history books. ‘White Mughals’ was published in 2003 winning the Wolfson Priza and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize. The book is to be made into a major motion picture, directed by Academy Award Winner, Ralph Fiennes. He also wrote ‘The Last Mughl: The Fall of a dynasty, Delhi, 1857’ (2006) and ‘Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India’ (2009). William is also a broadcaster, critic and art historian. He has been the South Asia correspondent of the New Statesman since 2004. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival. He is currently at work on ‘The Return of a King: Shah Shuja, the Great Game and the First Battle for Afghanistan,’ about the 1839–42 First Anglo-Afghan War, due to be published in June 2012, and co-curating a major exhibition on Late Mughal Art, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857. for the Asia Society in New York, to be opened in Februrary 2012.

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Clare Clark

Clare Clark was born in London in 1967. A Senior Scholar at Trinity College Cambridge she graduated with a Double First in History. Novels published by Penguin include The Great Stink, The Nature of Monsters, Savage Lands and forthcoming Beautiful Lies. She is married with two children and lives in London.
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Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he graduated with a Double-Starred First from Cambridge University, where he was a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999. He is the author of many books on Russian history, including A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, which in 1997 received the Wolfson Prize, the NCR Book Award, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002) was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. His latest is The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (also in hardback) (2007), which is featured here. The Whisperers is published by Allen Lane in the UK and by Metropolitan in the US. His agent is Rogers, Coleridge and White. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A list of his foreign publishers is available here. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
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Robert Skidelsky

Lord Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of the The World After Communism (1995) (American edition called The Road from Serfdom). He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He is chairman of the Govenors of Brighton College. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, "Against the Current", which is syndicated in newspapers all over the world. His account of the current economic crisis, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published by Penguin Allen Lane in September 2009. A short history of twentieth-century Britain was published by Random House in the volume A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark in January 2010. His latest book is How Much is Enough? The Economics of the Good Life jointly with his son Edward Skidelsky.
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Rosie Boycott- 40 years after Spare Rib

Rosie is a writer and broadcaster whose career has spanned the national media. She has been Editor of Esquire, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent, and The Express. She co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1971. She has also appeared regularly on The Late Review (BBC2) and The Moral Maze (BBC Radio 4), and written several books, including A Nice Girl Like Me and Our Farm: A Year in the Life of a Smallholding. She is a co-founder of 5x15, a Trustee of the Hay Festival and a non-Exectutive Director of the Eden Project.
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