Contributors

Jay Bahadur is a journalist specialising in Somali piracy. He has featured as an expert on the BBC's Today Programme and CBS News, and his articles have been published in The Times and Globe and Mail. This is his first book. Profile published the hardback in 2011 [9781846683633].

Caroline Bain is the Senior Commodities Economist at Capital Economics. She previously held the same title at the Economist Intelligence Unit. She holds economics degrees from Trinity College Dublin and the University of London.

Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author, specialising in Georgian art and architecture. Born in Toronto, she later emigrated to the UK to pursue an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a PhD from the University of York in art history. Upon completing her studies, she moved to the Isle of Bute off the Western coast of Scotland, and worked as a curator at Mount Stuart, a late Victorian Gothic Revival palace. When she isn't visiting haunted houses and recording her ghost story-themed history podcast, Haunted Homes, Caitlin is based in East Sussex.

Ray Axford took up archery in 1975 and qualified as a County Coach in 1982. He has coached throughout the Southern Region and has also lectured widely on human anatomy and biomechanics. He has provided illustrations for the National Coaching Manual and has written and illustrated articles for archery magazines. Formerly senior designer and development engineer for an aircraft instrument company, he was responsible for several innovative aircraft and missile control systems and later, as a design consultant, he was involved in the concept and design of various advanced technology projects in America, Europe and the United Kingdom.

Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. After studying and briefly teaching philosophy, a period of left-wing tourism in France and Italy led to his learning to read and converse in these languages, and to take part in the intense, opaque discourses of Marxism. A period of work as translator led to a job as editor with Pluto Press and to his founding in 1986 of Serpent's Tail with the specific remit of publishing fiction in translation; this includes two First World War classics, Frederic Manning's Her Privates We and Gabriel Chevallier's Fear, both represented in No Man's Land.

Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, Alain Badiou is a leading French philosopher. With Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, he has reclaimed for the radical left the concepts of being, truth and the subject. A lifelong communist, he is the author of The Meaning of Sarkozy, Being and Event, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and The Communist Hypothesis.

Marc David Baer is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has published widely on Jewish and Islamic history, and is an expert on the Ottoman empire. His most recent work, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.

Anna Aslanyan is a journalist, translator and public service interpreter. She contributes to
the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and other UK-based publications, writing
about books and arts. Her translations from Russian include Post-Post Soviet? Art,
Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade, a collection of essays edited by
Ekaterina Degot et al. (University of Chicago Press, 2013); contemporary short stories for
Best European Fiction (Dalkey Archive, 2013, 2018); and A Journey to Inner Africa, a
19th-century travelogue by Egor Kovalevsky (Amherst College Press, 2020). Her popular
history of translation, Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History, was
published by Profile in May 2021.

David Astle is a Melbourne-based writer of non-fiction, fiction and drama. He co-hosts Letters and Numbers (the Australian version of Countdown) as the dictionary expert, and his crosswords appear in Australian papers The Ageand Sydney Morning Herald.

Jami Attenberg is the author of a story collection, Instant Love, and the novels The Kept Man, The Melting Season, All Grown Up, Saint Mazie and The Middlesteins, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She has been published in sixteen languages. She lives in New Orleans. Follow her @jamiattenberg

Nadia Attia is a BFI Network Talent Executive and a published journalist. In 2019 she won the FAB (Faber) prize for fiction and was selected for the London Writers Awards. A graduate of the Curtis Brown novel-writing course, Nadia has been published in Spread the Word's City of Stories anthology, Star Songs and Luna Station Quarterly. Verge is her first novel. @nadia_land_