Contributors

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian sociologist, postmodern philosopher and cultural critic. In 1990 he ran for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia and is currently the international director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Birkbeck.

Shoshana Zuboff has been called 'the true prophet of the information age' by the Financial Times for her ground-breaking book, In the Age of the Smart Machine. She is now the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School as well as Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In 2006, strategy+business magazine named her one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world.

Miek Zwamborn is an artist, novelist and poet. She lives and works on the Isle of Mull, in the Hebrides, where she runs a project working to explore the natural environment – and particularly its bountiful seaweed – with scientists, designers and artists.

Stefan Zweig (1981-1942) was the most widely translated writer of the 1920s and 1930s. A Jewish pacifist, he was driven by the Nazis into exile, first in London, then in Brazil, where he committed suicide in a pact with his wife. The manuscript for The Post Office Girl was found among his papers. Zweig's other novels include Beware of Pity and Chess Story.

Adrian Wooldridge is The Economist's management editor and author of the Schumpeter column. He was previously based in Washington, DC, as the Washington bureau chief where he also wrote the Lexington column, and also served as The Economist's West Coast correspondent, management correspondent and Britain correspondent. His books include: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, God is Back and The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State.

John Wright is a naturalist and one of Great Britain's leading experts on fungi. His most recent books include A Spotter's Guide to the Countryside and The Forager's Calendar. He lives in Dorset, where he regularly leads forays into nature and goes on long walks across all terrains.

James Wyllie is an author, award-winning screenwriter and broadcaster. He is author of Goering and Goering: Hitler's Henchman and His Anti-Nazi Brother and The Codebreakers: The true story of the secret intelligence team that changed the course of the First World War. He has worked on numerous films for the BBC, Film4 and Talkback among others, and has written for a number of TV drama series, including The Bill, The Tribe, and Atlantis High.

Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist and cognitive scientist. He runs the experimental anthropology lab at the University of Connecticut. This is his first trade book.

Don Young started his business career with Unilever, since when he has been a senior manager of several companies that have been forced to confront extensive change. He was a director of Redland plc from 1994 – 1998 and prior to that Thorn EMI plc, and he has co founded three management consultancies, YSC Ltd., Value Partnership Ltd., and Woodbridge Partners Ltd., an executive coaching partnership.
The Financial Times said of his previous book Having their Cake, 'a devastating analysis of the relationships between chief executives and investment banks'

Richard Youngs is the foremost expert on Europe's place in the world. He is director of FRIDE, the Madrid-based think-tank, and associate professor at the University of Warwick. He has written five previous books on European foreign policy.

Kira Yarmysh has been Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny's press secretary since 2014. In connection with her work for Navalny she has been arrested several times and spent fifty days in prison, and is currently living abroad in exile. This is her debut novel.

Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason, church conservator and author living and working in Frome, Somerset. He has four decades of experience working on some of the greatest cathedrals and churches in Britain, including the tower of Salisbury Cathedral and the dome of St Paul's in London. He is a SPAB William Morris Craft Fellow, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and conservation advisor to the Salisbury Diocesan advisory committee for the care of churches. He is the author of The Stonemason: A History of Building Britain.

N Quentin Woolf is a writer and broadcaster, and runs a number of literary groups, including Writers' Mutual and The Writers' Lab. He is the founder of The Brick Lane Book Group, teaches at the Idler Academy and since 2012 has run a writers' retreat in France. Woolf's short fiction has been published and translated internationally, and performed at Sadler's Wells. He has featured in various guises on BBC Radio 4, runs The Wireless Reader podcast and presents a weekly talk-show for Londonist.com, which attracts around 13,000 visits per day and a loyal following on iTunes.

Sol Yurick was born in 1925 in New York. The son of Jewish immigrants, Yurick grew up in a politically active working-class household. He enlisted in the Army during the Second World War, then studied literature before taking a job in New York City's welfare department, where he became familiar with the children of welfare families, many of whom belonged to youth gangs. This experience formed the basis for The Warriors, his first and best-known novel. He was a lifelong social activist and lived his whole life in New York; he died in Brooklyn in 2013.