Contributors

Kira Yarmysh has been Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny's press secretary since 2014. In connection with her work for Navalny she has been arrested several times and spent fifty days in prison, and is currently living abroad in exile. This is her debut novel.

N Quentin Woolf is a writer and broadcaster, and runs a number of literary groups, including Writers' Mutual and The Writers' Lab. He is the founder of The Brick Lane Book Group, teaches at the Idler Academy and since 2012 has run a writers' retreat in France. Woolf's short fiction has been published and translated internationally, and performed at Sadler's Wells. He has featured in various guises on BBC Radio 4, runs The Wireless Reader podcast and presents a weekly talk-show for Londonist.com, which attracts around 13,000 visits per day and a loyal following on iTunes.

Aidan Truhen is the pen name of a writer gone AWOL. He is not your grandmother's crime novelist. The Price You Pay is the first Aidan Truhen novel. There'll be more, though, so you'll want to save up. That or move somewhere they don't sell books. Your call.

Laura Wyatt-Smith is a digital wellness educator, professional coach and qualified teacher with twenty years' experience in some of the UK's foremost youth organisations, including The Prince's Trust, the Sex Education Forum and The Scout Association. She is the host of Childhood Heroes, a podcast about the big issues affecting modern childhood.

Yuan Yang is the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for Earley and Woodley constituency. She was the FT's Europe-China correspondent and the deputy chief of the FT's Beijing bureau. She is the founder of Rethinking Economics, a campaign which promotes a more relevant economics curriculum that reflects the real world in schools. Sam's story, and those of three other Chinese women, are the subject of Yuan Yang's forthcoming book, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China.

Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad were critically acclaimed across the globe, and she is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Statesman and the Nation.

Daniel T. Willingham, professor of cognitive science at the University of Virginia, is one of the most brilliant and prominent experts on learning in the world. He is well-known to New York Times readers through his opinion columns on the psychology of modern life.

Deborah Willis is a Canadian writer based in Calgary, Alberta. Her first story collection, Vanishing and Other Stories, was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction. Her second collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories, was longlisted for the 2017 Giller Prize and won the Georges Bugnet Award for best work of fiction published in Alberta. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Walrus, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Lucky Peach, and Zoetrope. Girlfriend on Mars is her first novel.

Valerie Wilmer is a music historian who has been documenting African-American music since 1959. She has written several books on the subject and documented her life in jazz in her autobiography – Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This. She is on the advisory panel of the prestigious New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and her photography features in the permanent collections of several museums. She lives in London.

My family was involved in running the British Empire in increasingly lowly postions sliding slowly down the social scale. They felt quite dislocated after WW II and my mother led a very marginal existence. Perhaps because of this she had me educated at St Paul's Girls' School, where I encountered a completely different world of the Jewish and non Jewish intelligentsia, and then at Oxford. Possbily because of the discrepancy between home background and sophisticated educational milieu I was extremely rebellious. I trained as a psychiatric social worker because of an interest in psychoanalysis, but throughout 10 years working in the field I was repelled by its conservative ethos and morality and eventually escaped to a polytechnic. But this time I was involved in Gay Liberation and the Women's Movement, which defined the 1970s for me. In the 1980s I became a lesbian co-parent and later a parent governor at Camden School for Girls. Beginning in the mid-70s I wrote a number of polemical/academic works about women, and then shifted into an interest in fashion and dress (I am currently Visiting Professor at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London). For some years I was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but am now a Green Party member. I am currently working on another novel and also on a book about the necessity of atheism.

Josephine Wilson lives in Perth, Western Australia with her partner and two children. Her first novel, Cusp, was published in 2005. Extinctions, her second novel, won the Miles Franklin Award in 2017.