Contributors

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and In the Dream House, which was the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Dinah Mack, a writer, earned her bachelor's degree in religious studies, and her master's in cultural anthropology.

Carol K. Mack is a playwright whose plays have been produced off-Broadway and in regional theatres across the United States. A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels & Other Subversive Spirits, written with her daughter Dinah Mack, was published by Profile Books in 2008 and in paperback as A Field Guide to Demons, Vampires, Fallen Angels & Other Subversive Spirits in 2010. Carol K. Mack has been Assistant Professor of Creative writing at New York University where she received an MA in Comparative Religious Studies in 1992.www.carolkmack.com

Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde (husband and wife) are laboratory directors at the Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI) in Phoenix, Arizona, where they study various aspects of visual, sensory and cognitive neuroscience. They have collaborated with Teller (of Penn & Teller) in their academic work, and their research has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, New Scientist and Wired magazine.

Alain Mabanckou's seven previous novels, including African Psycho, are all published by Serpent's Tail. Mabanckou teaches at UCLA, is a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur and was awarded the Académie Française's Grand Prix de littérature. Black Moses was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize.

Richard Mabey is one of our greatest nature writers. He is the author of some thirty books including the bestselling plant bible Flora Britannica, Food for Free, Turned Out Nice Again, Weeds: the Story of Outlaw Plants and Nature Cure which was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and Ackerley Awards. His biography, Gilbert White won the Whitbread Biography Award. A regular commentator on radio and in the national press, he was elected a Fellow in the Royal Society of Literature in 2012. He lives in Norfolk.

Fraser MacDonald is a lecturer in Human Geography at Edinburgh University where he teaches historical geography and the history of science. He has a regular byline at The Guardian and has also written for Aeon Magazine, The Herald, The Age, The Australian, the LRB Books blog, amongst others publications.

Alan Macfarlane is Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge. He has often visited and taught in Japan.

Joris Luyendijk was born December 30th 1971 in the Netherlands. His first three books are about the Middle East, the most successful of which appeared in English as Hello Everybody. Joris Luyendijk is currently living in London, having completed an anthropological investigation into how bankers in the City can live with themselves for the Guardian, now a book, Swimming with Sharks, My Journey into the World of the Bankers. (Faber)

Thomas Lys is Eric L. Kohler Chair in Accounting at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He is an editor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics and has served as a consultant for General Electric and IBM, among other companies. Lys lives in Mettawa, Illinois.

Chantal Lyons is a naturalist and science communicator who works with fishers in the UK and beyond to protect marine megafauna from bycatch. Her first book, Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain's Wild Boar, won the BES Marsh Ecology Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize.