Contributors

Michel Onfray was born in 1959 in the village of Argentan near Caen where he still lives. A high-school philosophy teacher for 20 years, he resigned from the state education sector and in 2002 set up the People's University in Caen. His twenty books map out a theory of hedonism: some celebrate the senses – smell, taste and the visual; others formulate a contemporary atheist ethics. He is currently at work  on a six-volume alternative history of philosophy of which the first two volumes have been published.

Tezer Özlü was born in 1943 in Turkey and lived in Paris, Ankara, Istanbul, Berlin and Zurich where she died in 1986. Cold Nights of Childhood is her first novel to be translated into English.

Ted Orland is a photographer, teacher and writer. Early in his career he served as Assistant to Ansel Adams, and later taught university level photography classes and workshops on artistic development. His art is represented by The Ansel Adams Gallery, and a selection of his early writings and photographs appear in his monograph, Scenes of Wonder & Curiosity.

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.

Pola Oloixarac was born in Buenos Aires. She is one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists. She was awarded the 2021 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award and is an Eccles fellow at the British Library. Oloixarac is a regular contributor to The New York Times, El País and La Nación, and her fiction has appeared in Granta, n+1, the White Review and Freeman's. She lives in Barcelona.

Eric Orton is a world-renowned running coach and author of The Cool Impossible. He works with winners, beginners and all in between, and has coached almost every race distance from 800 metres to 200 miles. Eric is based in the outdoor adventure paradise of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Dr Vjosa Osmani Sadriu is the sixth President of the Republic of Kosovo. In the 2021 elections, she became the most voted for politician in the history of elections in Kosovo. Prior to that, she was a five-time Member of Parliament and she served as the first woman Speaker of Parliament. With a steadfast commitment to strengthening democracy and the rule of law, her presidency is marked by her proactive approach in enhancing Kosovo's international standing. During her tenure as President, she's committed to advancing human rights and gender equality, with a particular focus in advancing the role of women in peace and security processes. As an advocate for sustainable development, she actively promotes impactful green energy solutions and climate action measures.

Sybil Oldfield is half German and half English. Her grandmother was a pacifist feminist socialist who was placed unofficially under Schreibverbot during the Nazi dictatorship. Her mother was classified as an 'enemy alien naturalized by marriage' in Britain after WWII broke out. Oldfield is now Emeritus Reader in English at the University of Sussex and a researcher for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A nuclear pacifist, she has campaigned on the psychological disarmament side of the anti-war movement since the 1960s.

David Olusoga is an Anglo-Nigerian historian and producer. Working across radio and television, his programmes have explored the themes of colonialism, slavery and scientific racism. He has written three books: The Kaiser's Holocaust, The World's War and Black and British: A Forgotten History, was a Waterstones History Book of the Year 2016, which was longlisted for the 2017 Orwell Prize and won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman and Longman History Today Trustees awards.
Find him on Twitter @DavidOlusoga

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. She is the founder of the Women's Therapy Centre of London, a former Guardian columnist and visiting professor at the London School of Economics and the author of a number of books including What Do Women Want, On Eating, Hunger Strike, The Impossibility of Sex, Bodies – which won the Women in Psychology Prize – and the international bestseller Fat is a Feminist Issue, which has sold well over a million copies. The New York Times said, 'She is probably the most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud'. She lives in London and lectures extensively worldwide.

Find her on Twitter @psychoanalysis

Lisa Olivera is a writer and therapist whose work centers around radical acceptance, cultivating compassion, and integrating our stories and full humanity. Lisa currently has a small private practice and creates courses, offerings and writings. She lives with her husband in northern California, and shares her work on Instagram @_lisaolivera.

Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex, Boys & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter. A contributing writer for New York Times Magazine, her work has appeared in publications including USA Today, Parenting, Salon and New Yorker. She lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter.

Stephen O'Shea, for many years a journalist in Paris and New York, contributed to a wide variety of publications on the arts and translated French feature films. The Friar of Carcassonne is his third book of medieval history. He currently lives with his two daughters in Providence, Rhode Island. stephenosheaonline.com

Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of Cribsheet and Expecting Better. Listed as one of TIME's most influential people 2022, her work is centred around humanising data to help people work through hard decisions. She spoke at the 2007 TED conference and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Esquire. Oster is married to economist Jesse Shapiro and is also the daughter of two economists. She has two children.

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).