Contributors

George Pelecanos was born in Washington, DC in 1957. He has worked as producer, writer and story editor for the acclaimed and award-winning US crime series, The Wire<i>; his writing for the show earned him an Emmy nomination. He is the author of fifteen crime novels set in and around Washington, DC. The Big Blowdown was the recipient of the International Crime Novel of the Year award in both Germany and Japan; King Suckerman was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger Award in the UK. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire and the collections Unusual Suspects and Best American Mystery Stories of 1997. He is an award-winning journalist and pop-culture essayist who has written for the Washington Post. Pelecanos has also been involved in the production of several feature films. Most recently he has written an adaptation of King Suckerman for Dimension Films, and was co-writer on Paid in Full. Pelecanos lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and three children.

Sarah Perry is the author of Essex Girls, Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood. She has been the UNESCO City of Literature writer-in-residence in Prague and a Gladstone's Library writer-in-residence. Her work has been translated into twenty two languages. She lives in Norwich

Fernando Pessoa, one of the founders of modernism, was born in Lisbon in 1888. He grew up in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was Portuguese consul. He returned to Lisbon in 1905 and worked as a clerk in an import-export company until his death in 1935. Most of Pessoa's writing was not published during his lifetime; The Book of Disquiet first came out in Portugal in 1982. Since its first publication, it has been hailed as a classic.

Chris Pearson is Professor of Environmental History at the University of Liverpool. A specialist in human-animal history, he is the author of Dogopolis and a contributor to Dog Hearted: Essays on Our Fierce and Familiar Companions. He is currently researching the lives of Indian street dogs in a project funded by the Wellcome Trust. He lives in Chester with his family and his Bedlington-Whippet, Cassie.

Madeleine Pelling is an award-winning cultural historian, author and broadcaster, and has held research fellowships at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh and Manchester. She is the co-host of History Hit's popular After Dark podcast and is a regular contributor for TV and radio, including for Channel 4, Sky Arts, Warner Bros and the BBC. Her words appear in the Guardian, Independent, BBC History Magazine and History Today, amongst others. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Melissa Panarello was born in Sicily in 1985 and now lives in Rome. Her teenage diaries formed the basis of One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, the book that scandalised Europe.

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.

After leaving Brixton Academy, Simon Parkes went on to run The Coronet in Elephant and Castle, as well as numerous other projects. He also got his life back, got married, had three sons, and did all the things he couldn't do when he was running the Brixton Academy. He and his family still live in Brixton.

Nicolas Padamsee grew up in Essex. He holds an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and is one of the Observer's best new novelists for 2024. He is the editor of Arts Against Extremism. He splits his time between Norwich and Upton Park, London.

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.