William Weir was born in 1933 and is the fourth generation of the family to have worked for the Weir Group. He succeeded his father as the third Viscount Weir in 1976. In 1999 he retired from the company having worked in a number of positions and served as chairman for 24 years. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he joined Weir's in 1958 after National Service in the Royal Navy.
His other business appointments have included being a member of the Court of the Bank of England, chairman of Balfour Beatty and C. P. Ships Ltd, and a director of British Steel Corporation, the British Bank of the Middle East and Canadian Pacific Railway. He has also been president of BEAMA, the trade association for the electrical manufacturing industries, and a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Monetary Policy.
He is married and lives in Ayrshire, and has three children.
Silke Rose West is a Waldorf teacher with over thirty years of experience teaching kindergarten-aged children. In 1995, she cofounded the Taos Waldorf School and today she runs an independent forest kindergarten called Taos Earth Children. She is renowned in Taos for her puppet shows and storytelling and consults with teachers and schools across the US.
Michael Wex (born September 12, 1954) is a Canadian novelist, playwright, translator, lecturer, performer, and author of books on language and literature. His specialty is Yiddish and his book Born to Kvetch was a surprise bestseller in 2005. Wex lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter Sabina.
Michael Wex was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada to a family of descendants of Rebbes of Ciechanów and Stryków. He has taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan.
Gregory White Smith is, with Steven Naifeh, the co-author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Jackson Pollock (the basis for the film Pollock), which was also a finalist for the National Book Award and a NYT bestseller; and the co-author of Van Gogh.
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in the town of Sighet, now part of Romania. During World War II, he, with his family and other Jews from the area, were deported to the German concentration camps, where his parents and younger sister perished. Wiesel and his two older sisters survived. Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 by advancing Allied troops, he was taken to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a journalist.
In 1958, he published his first book, La Nuit, a memoir of his experiences in the concentration camps. He has since authored nearly thirty books, some of which use these events as their basic material. In his many lectures, Wiesel has concerned himself with the situation of the Jews and other groups who have suffered persecution and death because of their religion, race or national origin. He has been outspoken on the plight of Soviet Jewry, on Ethiopian Jewry and on behalf of the State of Israel today.
Wiesel made his home in New York City, and became a United States citizen. He was a visiting scholar at Yale University, a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City College of New York, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University where he taught 'Literature of Memory.' Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council from 1980 – 1986, Wiesel served on numerous boards of trustees and advisors. He died in 2016.
Cory Wharton-Malcolm is a running coach, Runner's World columnist, founder of West London running crew TrackMafia and Apple Fitness+ trainer who embarks on running adventures all over the world with 'Time To Run'. Previously Nike Run Club's European Head Coach and still the voice of the Nike Run Club app, he has been featured in publications including Guardian, Evening Standard, Men's Health and Metro.
Caroline (Carrie) Vout is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is also Director of Cambridge's Museum of Classical Archaeology and has curated exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Carrie has appeared on Woman's Hour and In Our Time, and contributed pieces to magazines such as Apollo, Minerva, History Today, and to Times Literary Supplement and Observer. In 2012 and 2013, she chaired the judging panel of the John D. Criticos Prize, and from 2019 to 2024 holds the Byvanck Chair at Leiden University. She has given public lectures across the world, and is regularly invited to talk to schools.
Born and bred in Yorkshire, Ashley Ward is a professor in Animal Behaviour at the University of Sydney, the culmination of a career spent studying the behaviour of animals from tiny Antarctic krill to mammals, including humans. He has published over 100 scientific journal articles and a highly cited academic book.
Robert Walser was born in Switzerland in 1878 and worked as a bank clerk before becoming a writer. In 1929 he was diagnosed as 'schizophrenic' and lived the last twenty years of his life in hospital. His novels include Jakob von Gunten and The Assistant. Robert Walser died in 1956.
Joanna Walsh's work has appearedin Granta, Narrative, The Stinging Fly and Guernica, amongst others. Her first collection, Fractals, was published by 3:AM Press in 2013 and her non-fiction work Hotel was published internationally by Bloomsbury in 2015. This was followed by Grow a Pair and her most recent collection Vertigo, which was published by And Other Stories in the UK in 2016. Her digitally groundbreaking novella Seed was released in 2017 as well as her third collection of stories, Words from the World's End.
Catriona Ward was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in the US, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen and Morocco. She read English at the University of Oxford and spent several years working as an actor in New York. When she returned to the UK she worked on her first novel while writing for a human rights foundation, then took an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her first novel, Rawblood, was published in 2015 and won the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel in 2016. She won again in 2018 for Little Eve, which also won the prestigious Shirley Jackson Award. In 2021 she published her bestselling novel The Last House on Needless Street, which was both a Richard and Judy Book Club and BBC Two Between the Covers Book Club pick. It was awarded the August Derleth Award in 2022, making Ward the only woman to prize three times. She was shortlisted again for her fourth novel, Sundial, in 2023. Her fifth novel, Looking Glass Sound, was shortlisted the Fingerprint Genre-Busting Book of the Year in 2024. Her next novel, Nowhere Burning, will be published by Viper in 2025.
Mark van Vugt is professor of psychology at the VU University of Amsterdam and holds honorary positions at the Universities of Oxford and Kent in the UK.
James Ward's London-based blog, I Like Boring Things, has featured in the Independent, Observer and on the BBC website. He is co-founder of Stationery Club and the Boring Conference, featured in the Wall Street Journal and on Radio 4. Adventures in Stationery is his first book.
Amanda Waring is a campaigner for dignity within health and social care, and the author of The Heart of Care and Being A Good Carer. A filmmaker, her campaigning film 'What Do You See' has been shown across the world, and she is a leader of training workshops on dignified care of the elderly. Amanda is a presenter for Aged Care TV, an adviser on the government's Dignity Board.
