Contributors

John A. Lomax (1867-1948) recorded classics such as 'Home on the Range' and 'Goodnight Irene' and with son Alan, helped launch the musical careers of Leadbelly and Pete Seeger. His extensive recordings and papers are housed in the Library of Congress and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Flo Longhorn has worked for many years with children with severe learning difficulties, both in Britain and in the United States. She now works as a special consultant in special needs in the UK and abroad.

Nick Lovegrove is a veteran consultant, executive coach and writer. He is currently the U.S. Managing Partner of the Brunswick Group, a global corporate advisory firm. Formerly a senior partner at McKinsey & Company in the United States and the United Kingdom, Lovegrove has been a senior fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

James Lovelock, who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory). His many books on the subject include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Revenge of Gaia (2006), The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009) and A Rough Ride to the Future (2014). In 2003 he was made a Companion of Honour by Her Majesty the Queen, in 2005 Prospect magazine named him one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals, and in 2006 he received the Wollaston Medal, the highest Award of the UK Geological Society. He died on the day of his 103rd birthday in July 2022.

Rosemary Low is the author of The Parrot Companion and has been the curator of two of the world's largest parrot collections. She was the editor of "PsittaScene" for 15 years.

Steven Lukes is a professor of sociology at New York University. He has written many books about political and social theory, including Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work and the seminal Power: A Radical View, recently released in a new edition 30 years after it was first published.

Christina Lupton grew up in communes in London and Australia, dropped out of school at 15 and recovered her taste in study to take a degree in critical and cultural theory at the University of Sussex and then to do a PhD at Rutgers in New Jersey. She has taught English Literature at universities around the world and written on novels and the history of reading, including in her book, Reading and the Making of Time (2018). She is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick, but is on leave while serving as the Dean of Modern Languages at KU in Copenhagen. She lives in that city with her partner and children.

Hana Loftus grew up in east Suffolk and, after spells in London and rural Alabama, has lived in north Essex for the last eighteen years. She is an architect, planner and writer, and has contributed to a number of books, including most recently Common Treasures, an anthology of essays about the challenges faced by rural communities, as well as writing for architecture, art and planning journals. She was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2025. Sixteen Acres is her first book.

Attica Locke is the author of Heaven, My Home, a Waterstones Thriller of the Month, Bluebird, Bluebird which won the CWA Steel Dagger and an Edgar Award; Pleasantville, which won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction; Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award and shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Attica Locke has worked on the adaptation of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere and Ava DuVernay's Netflix series about the Central Park Five, When They See Us. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.

Kathryn Lomas is Honorary Research Fellow in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Durham. Her books include Roman Italy 338 BC to AD 200: A Sourcebook</i>; Rome and the Western Greeks, 350 BC – AD 200: Conquest and Acculturation in Southern Italy</i>; and numerous edited volumes on Italian history and archaeology.