Contributors

Joy Williams is the author of four novels – the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 – and three collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honours are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

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.

Douglas Wolk is a Portland, Oregon-based author and critic. He has written about comics and popular music for publications including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, Nation, New Republic, Salon.com, Pitchfork Media, Vanity Fair, and Believer.

Callum Williams is senior economics writer for the Economist. Examining the rationale behind economic and political developments from Brexit to Jeremy Corbyn's policy statements has allowed him to witness the ghosts of the classical economists being invoked in all sorts of doubtful ways.
Follow @econcallum on Twitter

Caroline Williams originally planned to be a PE teacher, but ended up studying biology because she found the science aspects of PE more interesting than the team sports. The author of Override, she is a consultant and writer for New Scientist, and has spent several years researching the links between movement and the mind. Throwing your inner ear off balance will always change how you feel; Caroline likes to improve her mood by cycling down bumpy hills.

Jeff Wilser is the author of four books, including The Good News About What's Bad for You…The Bad News About What's Good for You, named by Amazon as one of the Best Books of the Month in both Nonfiction and Humour. His work has appeared in print or online at GQ, Esquire, New York magazine, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Mental Floss, MTV, and Huffington Post. His TV appearances have ranged from BBC News to The View. He lives in New York.

Paul Wilson is a winner of the Portico Prize for Literature for Do White Whales Sing at the Edge of the World? His previous novel, The Visiting Angel, was shortlisted for the 2011-12 Portico Fiction Prize. He has worked in a range of social care settings and is Vice Chairman of the British Association for Supported Employment. He lives in Lancashire.

Jasper Winn grew up in West Cork, where he left school age ten and educated himself by reading, riding horses and playing music, an upbringing that shaped a lifetime of travel. He is the author of Paddle: A Long Way Around Ireland (Sort Of Books), the story of a solo trip by kayak, and is currently Writer in Residence for the Canal and River Trust.

Ruth Winstone is the editor of Chris Mullin's trilogy of diaries covering British political life 1994-2010 and of Tony Benn's written and taped records. For many years she worked as a senior clerk in the library of the House of Commons.