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John Barlow was born in West Yorkshire. He worked as a cabaret musician before reading English Literature at the University of Cambridge, followed by a doctorate in Language Acquisition at the University of Hull. He remained in the academic world as a university lecturer in English Language until 2004, at which point he moved to Spain. He currently works as a writer, ghost writer, food journalist and translator, and lives in the Galician city of A Coruna with his partner and two sons.

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.

Geraldine Brooks was born and raised in Australia. After moving to the USA she worked for eleven years on The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, was an international bestseller and she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her second, March. She has written three further bestselling novels, Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book and The Secret Chord.

Sandra Blakeslee is an award-winning science writer for the ‘New York Times’ and co-author of the best selling ‘Second Chance’.

Tom Bower has a distinguished reputation as an investigative historian, broadcaster and journalist and is the author of several ground-breaking books about tycoons. His most recent works are ‘Conrad and Lady Black’, ‘The Squeeze’ and his biographies of Simon Cowell and Bernie Ecclestone. Among his other much-debated biographies are those of Mohammed Fayed, Richard Branson and Robert Maxwell.

Joanna Blythman is Britain’s leading investigative food journalist. She has won four Glenfiddich awards for her writing, a Caroline Walker Media Award for ‘Improving the Nation’s Health by Means of Good Food’, and a Guild of Food Writers Award for The Food We Eat. In 2004, she won the prestigious Derek Cooper Award, one of BBC Radio 4’s Food and Farming Awards. She writes and broadcasts frequently on food issues.

Craig Brown has been writing the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye since 1989. He has written for a widevariety of publications, including the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Spectator. His books include One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and Ma’am Darling, which won the James Tait Black award.

Carl Barat is an English musician and actor. He was the frontman and lead singer of Dirty Pretty Things and was co-frontman of The Libertines.

Tilly Bagshawe is the internationally bestselling author of nine previous novels. A single mother at seventeen, Tilly won a place at Cambridge University and took her baby daughter with her.
She went on to enjoy a successful career in the City before becoming a writer. As a journalist, Tilly contributed regularly to the Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Evening Standard before following in the footsteps of her sister Louise and turning her hand to novels.