Contributors

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.

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.

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.

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.

The writer and artist Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is best known as the creator of the Moomin children's stories, which have been published in 35 languages. The Summer Book was one of ten novels she wrote for adults. It is regarded as a modern classic throughout Scandinavia.

Henry James Garrett has written and illustrated for The New York Times, created Valentine's cards for The Fawcett Society, provided a drawing of Meghan Markle's dog as a gift for her, cartooned for the i Newspaper, Buzzfeed and London Pride, had solo exhibitions in London and a beautiful phonebox in Brighton and made greeting cards. He can be found on Instagram @henryjgarrett.

Paul Jankowski is Raymond Ginger Professor of History at Brandeis University. His many publications include Stavinksy: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue; Shades of Indignation: Political Scandals in France, Past and Present; and most recently, Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War.

Award-winning poet, Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. Her first travel book, Among Muslims (also published by Sort Of Books), was described as 'utterly luminous' (The Independent) and 'one of the most powerful accounts by a contemporary Western writer' (TLS).

Her latest poetry collection, The Tree House (Picador), won the 2004 Forward prize.

A part-time lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University, Kathleen Jamie lives with her family in Fife.

Robert Irwin was a novelist, publisher, reviewer, Arabist and historian. He was formerly a lecturer in the Department of Mediaeval History in the University of St Andrews and later a Senior Research Associate of the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. He published seventeen books, of which six are novels. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Memoirs of a Dervish was published by Profile in 2011.

Stuart Isacoff is active across North America and Europe as a writer, pianist, composer and lecturer. His ongoing presence in the cultural landscape has included presentations at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center, as well as at festivals around the world and regular contributions on music and art to the Wall Street Journal. Until 2014, he was on the faculty of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music and the Purchase College Conservatory of Dance (SUNY).
Isacoff is the author of A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians-From Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between.

He is a winner of the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music, and the 2017 recipient of the Communications Prize awarded by the Artistic Committee of Cremona Musica.

Stuart Isacoff has given lectures and piano performances both here and abroad, at such venues as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Verbier Festival and Academy (Switzerland), Music@Menlo, the Portland Piano Festival, the Miami Piano Festival, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the September Music Festival (Torino), the Gina Bachauer Foundation, the Van Cliburn Piano Institute and others, as well as at such scientific institutions as the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Bradbury Science Museum and the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics.

His compositions, arrangements, editions, and instructional texts have been published internationally. He was the founding editor of the magazine Piano Today, a position he held for nearly three decades.

Stuart Isacoff's piano recitals combine classical repertoire with jazz improvisation, demonstrating the threads that connect musical works created centuries and continents apart. Of his playing, pianist André Watts has said: 'Stuart Isacoff's music-making is original and revelatory. Subtle, brilliant use of the instrument combined with a unique musical perspective, create performances of uncommon depth. Isacoff reveals his beautiful interior world with every performance.'

Alan Jacobs is the Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Baylor University. He has written extensively for The Atlantic, WSJ, The New Atlantis, and Harper's and is the author of several books including a well-received biography of C. S. Lewis and a book on the pleasures of reading.

Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in London and on the road. She is the author of Work Won't Love You Back, Necessary Trouble and From the Ashes.

Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her work has featured in the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Baffler, Washington Post and New York Review of Books among many others. She is a columnist at The Progressive and a contributing writer at In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today's labour movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism.

Sarah has been a waitress, a bicycle mechanic, and a social media consultant, cleaned up trash and scooped ice cream and explained Soviet communism to middle schoolers. Journalism pays better than some of these.