Contributors

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.

Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) studied painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger in Paris, before returning to Buenos Aires. Her first collection of stories, Forgotten Journey appeared in 1937. She was also a prolific poet and translator. Ocampo was reportedly denied Argentina's National Prize for fiction in 1979 after judges decided her work was 'too cruel'.

Kenzaburo Oe is Japan's most important living writer. Born in 1935 on the island of Shikoku, Oe studied literature at Tokyo University before spending the sixties in Paris where he came under the influence of Sartre. After his debut novel, he wrote a string of books dissecting contemporary Japan, including Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!, The Pinch Runner Memorandum and the essay collection Hiroshima Notes, on the impact on Japan's national psyche of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War. He lives in Tokyo with his wife and his eldest son Hikari, who was born with severe brain damage; many of the narrators in Oe's fiction have brain-damaged children, most notably in the semi-autobiographical novel A Personal Matter. He won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Nat Ogle was born in 1991 and raised in Darlington, County Durham. He works as a bookseller in London.
In the Seeing Hands of Others is his first novel.

Ali Nolan is a journalist and writer based in Utah, USA. As the former features editor and current contributor for Runner's World, she is active in empowering women in the running world, having spoken at the Under Armour Women's Panel, Donna Marathon Pre-Race Dinner, and
other events. She has completed two road marathons, a trail marathon, and other races.

After leaving Oxford, Edward Norfolk worked as an accountant with Coopers & Lybrand before setting up his own bottled LPG company, now part of Esso. He then set up
a waste management company before selling it to Viridor in 2002. He is currently involved in ten private equity start-up companies as an adviser, and spends a lot of his time running his family estates. As the Duke of Norfolk, he is also the Earl Marshal and was responsible for delivering the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the coronation of King Charles III.

Nathan Oates's debut collection of short stories, The Empty House, won the 2012 Spokane Prize. He is an associate professor at Seton Hall University, where he teaches creative writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his family. A Flaw in the Design is his debut novel.

John O'Connell is a writer, editor and researcher who has written for the Guardian, The Times, the New Statesman and TimeOut. He is the author of, among others, For The Love of Letters, The Book of Spice, and the acclaimed Bowie's Books.

Richard O'Connor is the author of five books, Undoing Depression, Active Treatment of Depression, Undoing Perpetual Stress, Happy At Last, and Rewire. For fourteen years he was executive director of the Northwest Center for Family Service and Mental Health, overseeing the treatment of almost a thousand patients per year. He is a practicing psychotherapist, with offices in Canaan, Connecticut, and New York City, and he lives with his family in Lakeville, Connecticut.

James J. O'Donnell, author of Augustine:Sinner and Saint, The Ruin of the Roman Empire, and the forthcoming Pagans, is an academic turned administrator who uses his wide-ranging world travels to inform and inspire his writing. Educated at Princeton and Yale, long on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, he is now Provost of Georgetown University.

Peter O'Donnell began his career working on several major pre-war comics, Tiger Tim, Chips and Captain Moonlight. During the 1950's he became involved in strip cartoons and eventually created his revolutionary Modesty Blaise, syndicated in more than 42 countries. The strip led to a series of bestselling novels about Modesty and her faithful lieutenant, Willie Garvin, all published by Souvenir Press: Modesty Blaise, Sabre Tooth, I, Lucifer, The Impossible Virgin, Pieces of Modesty, A Taste for Death, The Silver Mistress, Dragon's Claw, The Xanadu Talisman, The Night of the Morningstar, Dead Man's Handle and his most recent collection Cobra Trap.

As well as being a respected journalist and editor focussed on retail and information technology, Penelope Ody qualified as a medical herbalist in the 1980s and practised part-time for 11 years. She has written more than 20 books on herbal topics, edited The Herb Society's journals from 1988 to 1994 and has written on herbal and health topics for several consumer magazines.

She frequently gives talks on herbal topics for both the general public and specialist groups and since 2002 she has held day courses on various herbal subjects at her home in Hampshire.

Catherine O'Flynn was born in Birmingham in 1970, where she grew up in and around her parents' sweet shop as the youngest child of a large family. She has been a teacher, web editor, mystery customer and postwoman. What Was Lost won the Costa First Novel Award 2007 and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and longlisted for the Orange and Man Booker prizes. She is the author of two further novels – The News From Where You Are and Mr Lynch's Holiday.