Contributors

Uttama Kirit Patel is a writer who has lived in twelve cities across three continents. She holds an MPhil in Psychology from the University of Cambridge, has been a semi-finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Rithy Panh was born in Cambodia in 1965. He is a film-maker whose documentaries, including Rice People, S 21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell have achieved an international reputation.

Soraya Palmer was born and raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC with roots in Trinidad and Jamaica. She works in Youth Organizing and holds a BA in Africana Studies an M.F.A. in Fiction. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, and Calyx. This is her first novel.

Vikram Paralkar was born and raised in Mumbai, and now lives in Philadelphia in the United States. He works as a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he treats patients with leukaemia and conducts research into the genetic mutations responsible for the illness.

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. She is the founder of the Women's Therapy Centre of London, a former Guardian columnist and visiting professor at the London School of Economics and the author of a number of books including What Do Women Want, On Eating, Hunger Strike, The Impossibility of Sex, Bodies – which won the Women in Psychology Prize – and the international bestseller Fat is a Feminist Issue, which has sold well over a million copies. The New York Times said, 'She is probably the most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud'. She lives in London and lectures extensively worldwide.

Find her on Twitter @psychoanalysis

Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex, Boys & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter. A contributing writer for New York Times Magazine, her work has appeared in publications including USA Today, Parenting, Salon and New Yorker. She lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter.

Stephen O'Shea, for many years a journalist in Paris and New York, contributed to a wide variety of publications on the arts and translated French feature films. The Friar of Carcassonne is his third book of medieval history. He currently lives with his two daughters in Providence, Rhode Island. stephenosheaonline.com

Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of Cribsheet and Expecting Better. Listed as one of TIME's most influential people 2022, her work is centred around humanising data to help people work through hard decisions. She spoke at the 2007 TED conference and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Esquire. Oster is married to economist Jesse Shapiro and is also the daughter of two economists. She has two children.

Emanuele Ottolenghi was born in Bologna, Italy. A Political Science graduate of the University of Bologna, he obtained his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and taught Israel Studies at Oxford from 1999 to 2006. Since 2006, he has been the director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute. A frequent commentator on Middle East affairs and transatlantic relations for many English-language and Italian publications, he is the author, most recently, of Autodafé: L'Europa, gli Ebrei e l'Antisemitismo (Lindau, 2007, in Italian).

William Outhwaite studied at the Universities of Oxford and Sussex, where he taught for many years, and has been Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University since 2007. He is the author of numerous ground breaking books on Social Theory.

Born in Essex, Mez Packer works as a lecturer in multimedia and futurism at Coventry University. Before that, she worked as a jazz singer in Portugal. She lives with her partner and her two children in Leamington, Warwickshire. Her debut novel Among Thieves was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Authors Club First Novel Award.