Robert Macfarlane is the author of a number of bestselling and prize-winning books including The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Holloway and Landmarks. His work has been translated into many languages and widely adapted for film, television and radio, and his essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and the Guardian.

Most recently, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forster Award for Literature 2017. Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently completing Underland, about underworlds real and imagined.

William Boyd is the author of one work of non-fiction, three collections of short stories and thirteen novels, including the bestselling historical spy thriller Restless winner of the Costa Novel of the Year and Any Human Heart, in which the character of Ian Fleming features.

Among his other awards are the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Jean Monnet. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In 2005, he was awarded the CBE. Born in Ghana in 1952, William Boyd spent much of his early life in West Africa. He now divides his time between the south-west of France and Chelsea, where he lives a stone’s throw from James Bond’s London address.

Candice Carty-Williams is a marketer, author and journalist based in London. Born in 1989, the result of an affair between a Jamaican cab driver and a Jamaican-Indian dyslexic receptionist, Candice worked in the media before moving into publishing aged 23.

In 2016, Candice created and launched the Guardian and 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, is a Penguin Books Write Now mentor, and she also contributes regularly to Refinery29, BEAT Magazine, Guardian Guide and i-D.

Chigozie Obioma is winner of the inaugural Financial Times/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Award for Fiction; the NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work - Debut Author; the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction [Los Angeles Times Book Prizes]; it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, as well as for several other prizes in the UK and US. Obioma was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's 100 Leading Global Thinkers.

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958.

He is the author of eleven acclaimed novels including The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van, two collections of short stories, Rory & Ita, a memoir about his parents, and most recently, The Guts.

He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels.

He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years. He has been traveling in and around Tibetan communities and the Himalayas for more than thirty years.

Jackie Morris is celebrated both as an author and an artist (illustrator of The Lost Words (2017) and author and illustrator of The Seal Children (new edition 2012). Artist in Residence at the Hay Festival in 2017, she lives at St David's, in Wales, maintains a very lively and informative blog, and is much in demand for story and illustration sessions, and signings.

Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother, and when she is not travelling she lives with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, The Pax Britannica Trilogy (Heaven's Command, Pax Britannica, and Farewell the Trumpets), and Conundrum.

She is also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and, more recently, the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. A Writer's World, a collection of her travel writing and reportage from over five decades, was published in 2003.

Sisonke Msimang was born in exile to South African parents - a freedom fighter and an accountant -and raised in Zambia, Kenya and Canada before studying in the US as an undergraduate. Her family returned to South Africa after apartheid was abolished in the early 1990s.

Sisonke has held fellowships at Yale University, the Aspen Institute and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Daily Maverick and New York Times. She now lives in Perth, Australia, where she is head of oral storytelling at the Centre for Stories.

Dina Nayeri was born in Iran during the revolution and arrived in America when she was ten years old. She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, an O. Henry Award and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. The author of two novels and contributor to The Displaced, her work has been published in over twenty countries. Her stories and essays have been published in Best American Short Stories and by the New York Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal and Granta. She lives in London. dinanayeri.com | @DinaNayeri

David Pilling has been a prize-winning reporter and editor with the Financial Times for twenty-five years. Throughout most of his career he has been a foreign correspondent and has worked and reported from Asia to America and from Africa to Latin America.

Currently the Africa editor for the Financial Times, he was previously the Asia editor, running coverage across the continent, while for the past decade, he has also been one of the newspaper's featured columnists. He has conducted dozens of interviews with world leaders, business executives, economists, artists and novelists from around the world.

He is the winner of several journalistic prizes, including Best Commentator prize by the Society of Publishers in Asia in both 2011 and 2012 and Best Foreign Commentator for 2011 in the UK's Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards for coverage of China, Japan and Pakistan. His first book, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (Allen Lane, 2014), received outstanding reviews. David Pilling lives in London but travels frequently to Africa.

Max Porter's first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, won the Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers' Award, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Max lives in Bath with his family.

Jancis Robinson is one of the world's best-known wine writers. In 1984 she was the first person outside the wine trade to qualify as a Master of Wine.

The Financial Times wine writer, she is the author/editor of dozens of wine books, including two of the most respected and garlanded, The Oxford Companion to Wine (OUP) and The World Atlas of Wine (Mitchell Beazley). She is widely regarded by the wine-drinking public as an authority on vine varieties.

Her award-winning website has subscribers in 100 countries.

Salley Vickers is the author of several bestselling novels including Miss Garnet's Angel, Mr Golightly's Holiday, The Other Side of You and Dancing Backwards.

Her most recent books are The Cleaner of Chartres (Viking 2012) and short story collection The Boy Who Could See Death (Viking 2015). She has worked as a cleaner, a dancer, a teacher of children with special needs, a university lecturer and a psychoanalyst. She now writes and lectures full time.

John Wood has been a part of the Australian entertainment industry for over 40 years earning himself a long list of credits for varied roles on stage and screen. His TV career was launched in 1976, playing “Sugar Renfrey” in the ABCTV Production of POWER WITHOUT GLORY, for which he won his first Logie as Best Supporting Actor. In the 1980’s he went on to star in the hit drama, RAFFERTY’S RULES as Magistrate Michael Rafferty which saw him become a well know and much admired television actor, taking out the Most Outstanding Actor Logie two years running. From 1994 and for the next 12 years, he played the role of Tom Croydon in BLUE HEELERS, one of our highest ever rating TV dramas.

It culminated in John winning the prestigious Gold Logie in 2006, after 10 consecutive nominations as most popular person on Australian Television. Away from acting, John showed his personality as one of the very first contestants on the popular DANCING WITH THE STARS and shared his passion for food and wine as host of WINE ME – DINE ME. We travelled with him as he researched his family history on the SBS Series WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? and laughed with him on Peter Hellier’s comedy program, IT’S A DATE alongside Denise Scott. As a regular face on Australian television, John has become a national favourite among all age groups.

His recent television roles include Patrick Tyneman, the baddie everybody loves to hate, in ABC’s THE DOCTOR BLAKE MYSTERIES and appearances in TRUE STORIES, HOW TO STAY MARRIED and THE YEARLY WITH CHARLIE PICKERING His stage career has included everything from Shakespeare to Williamson and a few musicals in between, again winning a number of Best Actor awards along the way. In 2019 he is touring nationally with SENIOR MOMENTS after recently appearing in SUMMER AND SMOKE, CARPE DIEM and BAKERSFIELD MIST.