Contributors

Gurnaik Johal is a writer from west London. His 2022 collection We Move won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Tata Literature Live! Prize and the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. In 2025, he was named an Observer Best New Novelist, and Saraswati, his debut novel, was nominated for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer Award, the Jhalak Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.

John Jay is a former managing editor for business news, at The Sunday Times and the author of Facing Fearful Odds: My father's story of captivity, escape and resistance 1940-1945. Ninette's War is his third book. He lives in London with his family.

Simon Jenkins is the author of the bestselling A Short History of England (Profile), England's Thousand Best Churches and England's Thousand Best Houses, Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations and most recently A Short History of Europe. From 2008 to 2014 he was the chairman of the National Trust, and the former editor of The Times and Evening Standard and a columnist for the
Guardian. He lives in London.

Michael Jenkins had a long career as a senior diplomat. He was Deputy Secretary-General of the European Commission and served as the British Ambassador to the Netherlands from 1988 to 1993, among other postings. He was knighted in 1990 and died in 2013.

Constance Jenkins has loved and lived with animals all her life. She composed the poem Weep Not For Me to comfort her sister, who had lost her much-loved cat. She lives in Chandler, Arizona.

Richard Jenkyns is Professor of the Classical Tradition, University of Oxford, a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall and author of a number of books including Dignity and Decadence: Some Classical Aspects of Victorian Art and Architecture and The Victorians and Ancient Greece.

Aravind Jayan lives in Bangalore in India. His writing has been published in Out of Print, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Helter Skelter's Anthology IV, and The Hindu, among others. He is the 2017 winner of the Toto Award for Fiction. He was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2021.

Oskar Jensen is an author and academic. He researches songs at Newcastle University, and has written scholarly tomes on Napoleon, ballad-singing, and most recently the London streets, with 2022's Vagabonds. He is a BBC New Generation Thinker, appearing frequently on Radios 3 and 4, as well as showing up in the New Statesman, on Who Do You Think You Are?, and as historical advisor for 2018's Vanity Fair and a forthcoming major motion picture. His debut adult novel, Helle and Death, was published in 2023.

Masood Javaid is Senior Advisor in the Managing Director's Office to a large sovereign wealth fund. Prior to that, he held senior positions at Mercury Asset Management and Merrill Lynch, and managed the UK's Post Office and British Telecom pension fund assets in the 1990s. He was also an Assistant Professor in Finance and Financial Economics at Warwick Business School.

Rula Jebreal is an award-winning journalist who specialises in immigration rights issues. She was born in Palestine, studied and worked in Italy for many years, and now lives in New York.

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature. The film of The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Rebecca F. John was born in 1986, and grew up in Pwll, a small village on the South Wales coast. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2014, she was highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize. In 2015, her short story 'The Glove Maker's Numbers' was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. She is the winner of the PEN International New Voices Award 2015, and the British participant of the 2016 Scritture Giovani project. Her first short story collection, Clown's Shoes, is available now through Parthian and she lives in Swansea with her three dogs. The Haunting of Henry Twist is her first novel, and is shortlisted for the 2017 Costa First Novel Award.