Contributors

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.

Jon Lomberg is an artist famous for his many collaborations with Carl Sagan, including COSMOS and CONTACT. He is the author of Murmurs of the Earth, co-authored with Sagan, as well as The Grand Cosmic Story and Voyager's Golden Record.

He was Design Director for the Voyager Golden Record. He also helped design four message artifacts on spacecraft now on Mars. Lomberg has an asteroid named after him for his many contributions to science communication. He lives in Kona Hawaii.

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.

A. G. Lombardo is a native Angeleno who teaches at a Los Angeles public high school. Graffiti Palace is his debut novel.

Russ Litten has written drama for television, radio and Hollywood film. He currently works as a writer in prisons and lives with his family in Kingston Upon Hull.

Dr Finbarr Livesey was a lecturer in public policy at the University of Cambridge, before which he spent ten years working in the Engineering department at Cambridge. He previously worked in technology development and continues to consult for national governments and multi-national corporations. He died in 2019.

Alan Lloyd is the author of more than 30 books, including Destroy Carthage, Marathon, and The Taras Report on the Last Days of Pompeii.

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.