Alison Light is a full-time writer. She is the author of five books of non-fiction to date and numerous other publications; she is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement among others. She writes and broadcasts chiefly on issues to do with British cultural life, literature and history. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society.

She is currently Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College, London and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of English Literature at Edinburgh University. She is also an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.

She was born in Portsmouth, UK and took a degree in English at Churchill College, Cambridge University. She then worked as a school teacher, as a studio manager at the BBC, and taught part-time in adult education. She gained a doctorate from Sussex University and has lectured, often part-time, in English at a number of institutions including Brighton Polytechnic, Royal Holloway College, and Newcastle University.

All her books have been enthusiastically reviewed in the national and international press. Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007) was also runner-up for the Longmans History Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson (now the Baillie Gifford) prize in non-fiction. Common People (2014) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize.

As the widow of the socialist historian, Raphael Samuel, who died in 1996, she spent several years helping to establish the Raphael Samuel History Centre and Archive: both are now flourishing in London. Her latest book, A Radical Romance, is a memoir of their marriage.

Biographer, academic, musician and BBC broadcaster Kate Kennedy is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, a presenter for BBC Radio 3, and Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She lectures in music and English at Oxford University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her biography Dweller in Shadows: Ivor Gurney, poet, composer was published by Princeton University Press in June 2021, and was shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize. Her edited collection with Dame Hermione Lee entitled Lives of Houses was published by Princeton in March 2020. She is currently writing a biographical memoir focussed around the cello, exploring our relationship with the instrument and its capacity to tell stories about the lives of its players. Cello will be published by Head of Zeus / Bloomsbury in 2023.

Her triple biography and operatic play The Fateful Voyage (2017) dramatizes the stories of Rupert Brooke and composers FS Kelly and William Denis Browne, and blends dance, opera and theatre (starring Alex Jennings). It was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement with Research by Oxford University in 2017.

She is a regular broadcaster and academic consultant to the BBC, and advised the commemorations for the First World War and for International Women’s Day for Radio 3, among other regular projects.

She is also in demand as a public lecturer and interviewer, appearing regularly at the Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre and Southbank Centre with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Berkeley Ensemble and Britten Sinfonia.

www.drkatekennedy.com

Alice is a music historian and author of fiction. Her academic work focuses on music collecting from 1700 to the present day, specialising in folk music. She is a Research Fellow in the Music Faculty at Oxford University, based at the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, where she recently published a biographical catalogue of the Anthony Baines Archive. She is a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and 2019-21 was a Humanities Knowledge Exchange Fellow, working with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She is Administrator at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and runs OWM’s feedback group on Tuesday afternoons.

Alice has had five anthologies of short fiction published, as well as individual short stories published elsewhere. She is currently Writer in Residence at Wytham Woods. She runs Didcot Writers, and co-ordinates the Oxfordshire group for the Society of Authors.

As a mentor, Alice is particularly interested in projects relating to any of her specialisms (music, British history, museums and objects), as well as works that bridge the gap between history and fiction, and in structural questions such as where to begin a story and how to provide background information within a forward-moving narrative.

https://alicelittle.co.uk/

Tony Gray completed his DPhil at Wolfson College Oxford in Philosophical Theology before entering the publishing industry.

Through his company Words by Design, Tony has worked on over a hundred private biographies (clients have included a polar explorer, a chimney sweep, peers of the realm, WWII POWs, CEOs of multi-nationals, hoteliers, teachers, missionaries, pilots and builders); researched and written a number of significant family histories (including histories of the Schwarzschild, Hajduska, Howarth and Quarmby families); and acted as a consultant for other publishing companies (helping set up and establish private presses and small independent publishers).

His research interests include theology of religions (his best-selling book was a cartoon guide to the basics of theology), family history (especially his own, where he has so far completed two out of a seven-volume series), human rights (having worked on edited collections such as Maternal Mortality and Human Rights and Contemporary Human Rights Challenges), and the histories of buildings (in particular the histories of small churches and their congregations, having so far worked on the histories of Chipping Norton Baptist Church, Stow-on-the-Wold Methodist Church, and Lydney Baptist Church).