Contributors

Tom Allan has been working as a thatcher since 2012. Based in South Devon, he also writes for the Guardian's Country Diary and the travel section of the Financial Times. He can be found at tomallanthatching.co.uk

William Allison worked extensively in Fleet Street and for BBC television news.

Alan Allport is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Syracuse University. He is the author of three previous volumes of history, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded, Demobbed – winner of the 2010 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award – and Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941.

Roland Allen is a publisher and author who lives in Hove. He studied at Manchester University and works in book (and notebook) publishing. He has written about subjects as diverse as bicycles and bread, kept a diary for decades, and enjoys stationery a little too much.

Ash Ali is an award-winning serial tech entrepreneur and investor. As the first marketing director of Just Eat UK, a FTSE 100 startup that IPO'd for £1.5 billion, and with over 20 years of hands-on experience in launching, growing and advising startups, he is an outspoken patron of social mobility and continuous education. The Unfair Advantage is his first book.

Alice Albinia is the prize-winning author of two books, Empires of the Indus and Leela's Book: A Novel. RLF Fellow at King's College London, she has spent the past seven years living in and traveling around the edges of Britain, from Orkney to Anglesey, discovering female-centred epic stories which have inspired this novel and a work of non-fiction, The Britannias, due to be published by Allen Lane in 2022.

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf, and Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Fifteen Dogs won the 2016 Giller Prize, and The Hidden Keys was published in 2017.

Anjana Ahuja is the Financial Times science columnist and holds a PhD in space physics.

Alexandra Aikhenvald is a professor at the James Cook University in Australia. Born in the USSR, she has lived and worked in the Amazon region of Brazil and Papua New Guinea, and speaks (among others) Estonian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Tariana, French, German, Yiddish and Tok Pisin, a Papuan language in which she occasionally dreams.

John Aitchison is a wildlife filmmaker. His many awards include a joint BAFTA and a joint Primetime Creative Emmy both for the cinematography of the BBC series Frozen Planet.