Contributors

Jasper Winn grew up in West Cork, where he left school age ten and educated himself by reading, riding horses and playing music, an upbringing that shaped a lifetime of travel. He is the author of Paddle: A Long Way Around Ireland (Sort Of Books), the story of a solo trip by kayak, and is currently Writer in Residence for the Canal and River Trust.

Ruth Winstone is the editor of Chris Mullin's trilogy of diaries covering British political life 1994-2010 and of Tony Benn's written and taped records. For many years she worked as a senior clerk in the library of the House of Commons.

Emily Wilson was educated at Oxford and Yale. She now teaches Classics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Richard Wingate is a principal investigator and lecturer in neuroscience at King's College London. He studies the development and evolution of the cerebellum and has a long standing interest in projects at the interface between Arts and Science.

Daniel T. Willingham, professor of cognitive science at the University of Virginia, is one of the most brilliant and prominent experts on learning in the world. He is well-known to New York Times readers through his opinion columns on the psychology of modern life.

Deborah Willis is a Canadian writer based in Calgary, Alberta. Her first story collection, Vanishing and Other Stories, was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction. Her second collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories, was longlisted for the 2017 Giller Prize and won the Georges Bugnet Award for best work of fiction published in Alberta. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Walrus, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Lucky Peach, and Zoetrope. Girlfriend on Mars is her first novel.

Paul Willetts is the author of four acclaimed works of non-fiction, the latest of these being Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms. Since making his literary debut with a biography of the Soho writer and dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross, he also edited four much-praised collections of Maclaren-Ross's writing. In parallel with these projects, he compiled and worked as co-photographer on Teenage Flicks, a jokey celebration of Subbuteo, featuring contributions by Will Self, Graham Taylor, David Baddiel and others. His journalism has appeared in the Independent, The Times, TLS, Spectator, Independent on Sunday and other publications.

Joy Williams is the author of four novels – the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 – and three collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honours are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

Valerie Wilmer is a music historian who has been documenting African-American music since 1959. She has written several books on the subject and documented her life in jazz in her autobiography – Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This. She is on the advisory panel of the prestigious New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and her photography features in the permanent collections of several museums. She lives in London.

My family was involved in running the British Empire in increasingly lowly postions sliding slowly down the social scale. They felt quite dislocated after WW II and my mother led a very marginal existence. Perhaps because of this she had me educated at St Paul's Girls' School, where I encountered a completely different world of the Jewish and non Jewish intelligentsia, and then at Oxford. Possbily because of the discrepancy between home background and sophisticated educational milieu I was extremely rebellious. I trained as a psychiatric social worker because of an interest in psychoanalysis, but throughout 10 years working in the field I was repelled by its conservative ethos and morality and eventually escaped to a polytechnic. But this time I was involved in Gay Liberation and the Women's Movement, which defined the 1970s for me. In the 1980s I became a lesbian co-parent and later a parent governor at Camden School for Girls. Beginning in the mid-70s I wrote a number of polemical/academic works about women, and then shifted into an interest in fashion and dress (I am currently Visiting Professor at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London). For some years I was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but am now a Green Party member. I am currently working on another novel and also on a book about the necessity of atheism.

Josephine Wilson lives in Perth, Western Australia with her partner and two children. Her first novel, Cusp, was published in 2005. Extinctions, her second novel, won the Miles Franklin Award in 2017.

Jeff Wilser is the author of four books, including The Good News About What's Bad for You…The Bad News About What's Good for You, named by Amazon as one of the Best Books of the Month in both Nonfiction and Humour. His work has appeared in print or online at GQ, Esquire, New York magazine, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Mental Floss, MTV, and Huffington Post. His TV appearances have ranged from BBC News to The View. He lives in New York.