Contributors

Lola Shoneyin has published three collections of poems and a children's book. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives is her debut novel. In 2014 she was named on the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40. Shoneyin is the director of Ake Arts and Book Festival. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

Randy Shilts saw himself as a literary journalist in the tradition of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote and was a pioneering voice in raising awareness of gay civil rights issues, as well as the AIDS crisis, and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists' Association in 1993. He found that he was HIV positive in 1987 and died in 1994. He also wrote The Mayor of Castro Street, a biography of Harvey Milk.

Raja Shehadeh is Palestine's leading writer. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq. Shehadeh was a National Book Award finalist in 2023 and is the author of several acclaimed books published by Profile, including the Orwell Prize-winning Palestinian Walks. He lives in Ramallah.

David Shenk is an American writer, lecturer, and filmmaker. He is author of six books and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, Wired, The New Yorker, New Republic, The Nation, The American Scholar, NPR and PBS. In mid-2009, he joined The Atlantic as a correspondent. He is a 1988 graduate of Brown University.

Gene Sharp (born 21 January 1928) is Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He is known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle, which have influenced numerous anti-government resistance movements around the world, most recently the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011.

Fiona Shaw is the author of three previous novels:The Sweetest Thing, The Picture She Took and Tell it to the Bees. She has also written a memoir, Out Of Me. She lives in York.

Charlotte Shane is a nonfiction author and essayist based in the USA. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times magazine, Harper's, Bookforum, the TLS, and elsewhere.

Haley Shapley is a journalist living in Seattle. A prolific freelance writer, her insatiable curiosity has led her to pen stories on everything from exploring a cave in Belize to digging into the history of Chautauqua life, to looking at why women and men are treated differently in the doctor's office. She has written for outlets including Teen Vogue, The Seattle Times, Forbes Health and the Telegraph. She is the author of Strong Like Her: A Celebration of Rule Breakers, History Makers, and Unstoppable Athletes.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and storyteller. She has published 20 books, and her work has been translated into 57 languages; her novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. A Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature, Shafak holds a PhD in political science, and has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK. In 2020 Shafak was awarded the Halldór Laxness International Literature Prize for her contribution to 'the renewal of the art of storytelling', and in 2021 she was chosen among the BBC's 100 most inspiring and influential women.

Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, has been writing about physics and mathematics for two decades. He is the author of six books, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, which won a PEN/Martha Albrand Award; Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the UniverseDecoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black HolesSun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, which won the 2009 Davis Prize from the History of Science Society; Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical DeceptionVirtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You So, How Do You Know It's True? Seife holds an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University, an M.S. in mathematics from Yale University, and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Meridith, and his children, Eliza and Daniel.

Born in Oxford within a distinguished academic family, Raphael studied
politics at Sussex University, before moving to Italy where he was a translator,
sold TV advertising and scooters. He has also taught in China and
since 2004 in the West Midlands, where he now lives. He interrupted an
MA in Islamic Studies at Birmingham University to write Beauty.