Cecile Pin is a London-based writer. Her debut novel Wandering Souls was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Prix Femina Etranger, and shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. She has won the Fragonard Prize for Foreign Literature, a Somerset Maugham Award, and a London Writers’ Award. In 2025, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe.
Karl Pilkington is a radio producer previously best known for producing The Ricky Gervais Show on Xfm. After leaving Xfm, Pilkington has reached an international audience through his appearances with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant on The Ricky Gervais Show podcast. He lives in London; this is his first book.
Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (b. 1968), a classicist by training, made his literary debut with a poetry collection in 1999 that was an homage to the experimental poetry of his great models, Pindar and Lucebert. In the years that followed, in addition to poetry, he has written stage plays, essays, columns, travel accounts, stories, political satires, and four novels written in the spirit of Rabelais.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was one of the handful of indisputably great writers of this century. Troubled by ill-health throughout his life, he largely withdrew from society in 1907, to work on his incomparable 16-volume novel ‘In Search of Lost Time’. He lived long enough to see the publication of its first volumes, and to experience its universal reception as a work of genius.
Pamela Petro has been educated at Brown, Paris and Harvard Universities; in 1983 she went to the University of Wales at Lampeter for the first time, to do her MA, returning in 1992 for intensive instruction in the Welsh language. She has since taught Welsh and travel writing in the USA. She regularly contributes to the‘New York Times’ Travel Section and to ‘Planet’, and has compiled a guide to New England. This is her first ‘real’ book. She has, by the way, ‘no’ Welsh blood.
Philip Jacobson and Peter Pringle were the original Sunday Times Insight investigators into the events of Bloody Sunday. Philip is now a veteran foreign correspondent who was most recently chief of ‘The Times’ bureau in Paris. He has co-authored best-selling books on Northern Ireland and the 1973 Middle East War, and a biography of Aristotle Onassis. Married with two sons, he now lives in London.
Brian Patten was born in Liverpool in 1946 and is now recognised as one of Europe’s leading contemporary poets. His work is translated into many languages worldwide, and his collections (available in Flamingo) include ‘‘Grinning Jack’, ‘Love Poems’, and ‘‘Storm Damage’.
He is also well known for his children’s poetry and novels, and is the editor of the ‘Twentieth Century Book of Children’s Verse’.
Dominic Prince is a free-lance journalist and documentary maker who writes for the Telegraph, Sunday Times, Mail, Tatler and Private Eye and has made award-winning films on Lester Piggott and the last Waterloo Cup. He is married to the food writer, Rose Prince and lives in London, currently on a diet of lentil broth and oatmeal.
Sadie Plant is 33. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester and is the author of The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationalist International in a Postmodern Age. She has been a lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at the University of Warwick.
