Rebecca Stott iis an award-winning writer, historian and broadcaster. Her novels include Ghostwalk (a New York Times bestseller), The Coral Thief (BBC Book at Bedtime) and most recently Dark Earth, a historical thriller set in the sixth century in the ruined city of Londinium. Her memoir In the Days of Rain, an account of growing up in - and escaping - a fundamentalist Christian cult, was awarded the Costa Biography Prize in 2017. Her other non-fiction books include two books on Darwin: Darwin and the Barnacle and Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists as well as a cultural history of the oyster, called Oyster. She taught on the acclaimed creative writing course at UEA for fourteen years - until 2021 - and although she has now given up teaching to spend more time writing, she still does a little mentoring. She has just finished co-writing the screenplay of In the Days of Rain and co-creatiing a new television series on Boudicca and has begun a new novel. She lives in Lewes, Sussex.

Benjamin Teitelbaum is an author, professor, speaker, and musician. Based at the University of Colorado Boulder, he has also been a scholar in residence at the University of Campinas, Brazil, and Karlstad University in Sweden. He is interested in political radicalism, the extreme right, intellectual history, esotericism, and expressive culture. 

Author’s website: benjaminteitelbaum.com

Dr Leor Zmigrod is a prize-winning scientist whose research has pioneered the new field of ‘political neuroscience’. She completed her BA and PhD at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar and won a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge to develop an independent research program into the cognitive roots of ideological convictions. Dr Zmigrod has held visiting fellowships at Stanford University, Harvard University, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and at the Paris Institute of Advanced Study as the Gretty Mirdal Junior Chair in “Brain, Culture, and Society”. She was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science and won the United Kingdom’s Women of the Future Science Award. Dr Zmigrod also received the Cognitive Science Glushko Prize, the 2020 ESCAN Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, a Distinguished Junior Scholar Award by the American Political Science Association, and the Emerging Leader Award by the global Women in Cognitive Science. In 2022 she was named the Gold Winner ‘Unifier of the Year’ by MHP’s #30ToWatchPolitics for the impact of her scientific research on bringing communities together in British politics.  

Her book, The Ideological Brain, is forthcoming in 2025 with Viking of Penguin Random House in the UK, Holt of Macmillan in the US, and in over 10 translated editions, including Flammarion in French, Suhrkamp in German, and Rizzoli in Italian

Tania Unsworth started her working life as a journalist. Her articles have appeared in The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The New York Times among many others. She is the author of two novels for adults and five for children. Three of her novels for children – The Girl Who Thought Her Mother Was A Mermaid, The Time Traveller and The Tiger, and Nowhere Island were chosen as The Sunday Times’ Children’s Book of the Week. Her writing for children explores a range of genres, including sci-fi, magical realism and historical fiction. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Website: taniaunsworth.com

Instagram/Threads: tania.unsworth

X: @TaniaUnsworth1