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

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).

Anna Beer, a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford University, is an established life-writer with a series of major books to her name. She has many years of experience working with writers at various stages of their careers to take their work to the next level, most recently directing and teaching for the University of Oxford’s Creative Writing MSt, where she was the specialist non-fiction tutor.

Anna has published biographies of major literary figures, John Milton and William Shakespeare among them, but her particular interest as a writer remains the relationship between creativity and gender. Her Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, shortlisted for the RPS Creative Communication award in 2017, continues to generate other work, whether on stage, radio or television. Another biography has led to Anna being hired as a script consultant by a TV production company for a new historical drama series – although it is very much ‘in development’ at this stage!

Anna Beer’s latest book, to be published in the UK and US in October 2022, is Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature, and is her most ambitious, wide-ranging and (perhaps) controversial book to date. She is currently exploring some new literary avenues and is delighted at the thought of working with other writers on their own creative journey.

Soledad Fox Maura is V-Nee Yeh '81Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Williams College (USA) and a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar. She writes about lives, literature, history, and culture. Her biography of Constancia de la Mora was published in the UK and Spain. Her biography of Jorge Semprún was a Wall Street Journal "top 5 literary lives", and came out with Penguin Random House in Spain, Flammarion in France, and Arcade (New York). She has recently edited and published long lost autobiographical works by Spanish women, including Mi Cárcel by Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo, and a collected works by María Luisa Elío. Her first novel, Madrid Again, was published in 2020 (Arcade). She has published many scholarly articles and reviews, and has also written for Lit Hub and El País. She is interested in the blurry lines between memoir, fiction, and autofiction and is currently working on a biographical piece about the woman who inspired the story and legend behind the novella and opera Carmen.

soledadfoxmaura.com

Rebecca Abrams is a multi-genre author of both fiction and non-fiction with many years of experience teaching and mentoring writers in a wide range of narrative prose forms, including life writing, biography, biographical fiction and memoir. She has taught creative writing at the University of Oxford since 2007 and has been a mentor for the Oxford Life Writing Centre since 2020. She was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford from 2017-20, and previously taught on the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick and held posts as a First Story Writer-in-Residence and Gladstone's Library Writer-in-Residence.

Rebecca's most recent non-fiction titles include a biography, Licoricia of Winchester: Power and Prejudice in Medieval England (LOWA); a material history, The Jewish Journey: 4000 years in 22 Objects (Ashmolean Museum), and the acclaimed historical novel, Touching Distance (Picador), which was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize for Literature and won the MJA Open Book Award. Earlier works include Woman in a Man's World, drawing on extensive oral history interviews with pioneering career women and the best-selling When Parents Die, a pioneering self help book, which drew attention to a previously overlooked form of bereavement. She is the editor of two anthologies of new writing and co-editor of Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries, which was longlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize. She has written four stage plays, one of which, All of Us, a revisioning of Sophocles' Electra, premiered in New Zealand in May 2023. She is currently working on a play and a novel both set in the 13th century. A journalist of many years standing, she is the recipient of an Amnesty International Press Award, a former columnist for the Daily Telegraph and a regular book critic for the Financial Times.