Contributors

Bella Bathurst is a writer and photojournalist. Her books include The Lighthouse Stevensons which won the 1999 Somerset Maugham Award, The Wreckers, which became a BBC Timewatch documentary, and The Bicycle Book, which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011.

Devorah Baum is the author of the forthcoming Feeling Jewish (a book for just about anyone) (Yale, 2017) and co-director of the documentary film The New Man. She is Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton and affiliate of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.

Mary Beard is the most acclaimed classicist working today. She is the Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge and is the Classics editor of the TLS. She is also the co-host, with Charlotte Higgins, of the podcast Instant Classics. Her books include the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii as well as Confronting the Classics, SPQR, Women & Power, Emperor of Rome and Talking Classics. Her work has been published in over 35 languages.

Ernest Becker was born in Massachusetts to Jewish immigrant parents. After completing military service, in which he served in the infantry and helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he attended SyracuseUniversity in New York. In his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. The first of his nine books, Zen: A Rational Critique was published in 1961. He died in 1974 at the age of 49, two months before he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death.After his death, the Ernest Becker Foundation was founded, using Becker's ideas to support research in science, the humanities, social action and religion.

Catherine Belsey chaired the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University before moving to Swansea as Research Professor in English. Much of her work is on Shakespeare and cultural criticism. Her books include Critical Practice (1980, second edition 2002), Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002) and A Future for Criticism (2011).

Born in 1958, Neil Bartlett has spent twenty-five years at the cutting edge of British gay culture. His ground-breaking study of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? paved the way for a queer re-imagining of history ; his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was voted Capital Gay Book of The Year; his second, Mr Clive and Mr Page, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. Both have since been translated into five European languages. Listing him as one of the country's fifty most significant gay cultural figures, the Independent said "Brilliant,beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility". He also works as a director, and in 2000 was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre.

Jon Bauer was born in Surrey but now lives in Australia. He has written short stories and plays for stage and radio. Rocks in the Belly, his first novel, was shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and won the Indie Fiction Award in Australia.

Celia Bell's short fiction has appeared in VQR, The White Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she works in beekeeping when not writing.

Jean-Martin Bauer is the World Food Programme's Country Director in Haiti. A twenty-year veteran of the United Nations, he has worked to combat hunger in West Africa, Syria, Iraq, and Central Africa. He has received awards from Harvard and MIT, as well as the Nominet Trust in the UK.

David Bayles is a photographer, writer & conservationist. He is the past Director of Pacific Rivers Council and co-author of numerous scientific articles on endangered aquatic species. His recent book Notes on a Shared Landscape offers a superbly crafted collection of his photographs & personal writings about the American West.

Nahid de Belgeonne, known as 'the nervous system whisperer', is a Somatic Movement Educator and breath and yoga teacher with a passion for sharing the healing benefits of movement. She has been a pivotal part of the London fitness landscape for 15 years, operating the yoga and wellbeing brand Good Vibes and now focuses on private clients with her somatic and restorative system called The Human Method. She has been featured in publications including The Times, Harpers Bazaar, Tatler and Stylist.

Jo Ann Beard is the author the collections Festival Days and The Boys of My Youth, and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and others, and has received a Whiting Foundation Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Andrew Bayliss is Associate Professor in Greek History at the University of Birmingham. He has taught and studied in Australia, Greece and the UK, and his published works on ancient Greek history include Oath and State in Ancient Greece (2012), The Spartans (2020) and The Spartans: A Very Short Introduction (2022).