Bill Bryson's bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent and Notes from a Small Island, which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain. Another travel book, A Walk in the Woods, has become a major film starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson. His new number one Sunday Times bestseller is The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island.

His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society's Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union's highest literary award. He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, on history, and on his own childhood in the hilarious memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. His last critically lauded bestsellers were At Home: a Short History of Private Life, and One Summer: America 1927

Bill Bryson was born in the American Midwest, and now lives in the UK. A former Chancellor of Durham University, he was President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England for five years, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society.

Emma Young has always traded in words. Armed with a BA in English Literature, she became a bookseller. When the customers finally wore her out, she retrained as a journalist.

She is now a digital reporter for WAtoday, with work regularly appearing in sister publications The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Her eight wins at the WA Media Awards include the 2018 Matt Price Award for Best Columnist.

After turning thirty, she burst with belated urgency into novel-writing.

Since then, she has been selected for the 2018 Katharine Susannah Pritchard Writers’ Centre 1st Edition Retreat hosted by WA author Laurie Steed, and for the 2018-19 Four Centres Emerging Writers’ Program.

In 2019, her poetry appeared in Landscapes: The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language and The Last Bookshop was shortlisted for the inaugural $20,000 Fogarty Literary Award.

In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Arthur Lovekin Prize for Excellence in Journalism.

She has two more fiction manuscripts on the go.