Contributors

After working in computer systems analysis for a decade, John Burnside became a full-time writer in 1994. John has published 14 books of poetry, and has won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Petrarca Preis and, most recently, the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for his poetry. He has also published eight novels and a memoir. He is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.

Tim Burrows is a journalist, who has written about society, culture and place for the Guardian, New Statesman, Vice, the Daily Telegraph, Dazed & Confused, the Quietus and Somesuch Stories, among others. A recurring subject in his work is Essex and the Thames Estuary. His Guardian longread 'The Invention of Essex' was published to widespread acclaim. He lives in Southend-on-Sea, Essex.

Will Butler-Adams is a chartered engineer and CEO of Brompton Bicycle Limited. He was appointed OBE in the 2015 New Year Honours, featured in multiple publications including the Financial Times, and delivered talks for
Google and PwC. He lives with his family in London.

Dr Emma Byrne is a scientist, journalist, and public speaker. Her BBC Radio 4 'Four Thought' episode was selected as one of the "best of 2013" by the programme's editors. She has been selected as a British Science Association Media Fellow and for the BBC Expert Women Training, and is published in CIO, Forbes, the Financial Times and e-Health Insider. Swearing is Good For You is her first book.

Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, and also one of the organisers of the Wigtown Festival. His books about life running Scotland's largest second hand bookshop have been international bestsellers and translated into more than thirty languages.

Hailed by the New York Times as 'The Queen of Change', Julia Cameron is credited with starting a movement in 1992 that has brought creativity into the mainstream conversation – in the arts, in business, and in everyday life. She is the bestselling author of more than forty books, fiction and nonfiction; a poet, songwriter, filmmaker and playwright. Commonly referred to as 'The Godmother' or 'High Priestess' of creativity, her tools are based in practice, not theory, and she considers herself 'the floor sample of her own toolkit.' The Artist's Way has been translated into forty languages and sold over five million copies to date.

www.juliacameronlive.com

Deborah Cameron is Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford.

Joseph Campbell was interested in mythology since his childhood in New York, when he read books about Native Americans, frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History, and was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Columbia in 1925 and 1927 and went on to study medieval French and Sanskrit at the universities of Paris and Munich. After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 1940s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. The many books by Professor Campbell include The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Myths to Live By, The Flight of the Wild Gander, and The Mythic Image. He edited The Portable Arabian Nights, The Portable Jung, and other works. He died in 1987.
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s Eli Burnstein is a Canadian humour writer, living in London. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Slackjaw, Weekly Humorist and Points in Case. He runs a spelling bee (Spelling Bae) that has been featured in the Toronto Star and the National Post, and on CBC Radio.

Tom Bullough, age 26, grew up on a Welsh hill farm. He has worked as a music promoter in Zimbabwe and as a firewood deliveryman in Wales.

Anthony Burgess (1917-93) was a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. He is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, but altogether he wrote thirty-three novels, twenty-five works of non-fiction, two volumes of autobiography, three symphonies, more than 150 other musical works, reams of journalism and much more.

Catherine Burns is the editor of The Moth, a collection of short stories which originated with the organisation of the same name.

The Moth is an acclaimed not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. Since its launch in 1997, The Moth has presented thousands of stories, told live and without notes, to standing-room-only crowds worldwide. Moth shows are renowned for the great range of human experience they showcase.

Aifric is the author of On the Floor, which was long listed for the Orange Prize 2012. Her previous novels are The Semantics of Murder and The Loss Adjustor. She was born in Dublin, studied in Sweden and spent 13 years as an investment banker in London and currently teaches at Imperial College, London.