Contributors

Sally Urwin is (probably) the shortest farmer in England and lives with her family and a lot of sheep in Northumberland. She used to work in the most depressing job in the world – marketing manager for a bankruptcy practitioner – but made a bid for freedom after nabbing farmer Steve from the Dating Direct website in 2001.

Simon Van Der Velde has worked variously as a barman, labourer, teacher, caterer and lawyer, as well as travelling throughout Europe and South America collecting characters and insights for his award-winning stories. Since completing a creative writing MA in 2010, Simon's work has won and been shortlisted for numerous awards including the CWA Gold Dagger Award. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Federico Varese is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories.

A H (Bob) Vause is a Fellow of the Institute of the Chartered Accountants and an Emeritus Fellow of Templeton College, Oxford, where he has taught for more than 20 years. He is consultant to many large companies.

John Tottenham is a British-born artist and writer living in Los Angeles. He is the author of four volumes of poetry and writes a column in Artillery, and his paintings and drawings have been exhibited in solo shows in LA and New York. Service is his first novel.

Michael Tobin is an entrepreneur, businessman and philanthropist and an acknowledged authority on leadership, management techniques and business innovation. Founder and former CEO of TelecityGroup, he has won multiple business awards including Entrepreneur and Outstanding Leader of the Year, was nominated as Business Leader of the Year in the National Business Awards and received the OBE for 'Services to the Digital Economy.' He is the author of Forget Strategy. Get Results.

Jonathan Trigell was born in 1974 and has lived in Hertfordshire, Manchester, Derby and Stone. In 2002 he completed an MA in creative writing at Manchester University.

He has been a TV extra, an outdoor pursuits instructor and a door to door salesman; plus has worked right across the winter sports industry, from mopping floors and washing dishes to journalism and organising major events.

His first novel, Boy A, won the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best work by an author under 35, and also the Waverton Award, for best first novel of 2004.

Jonathan now lives in Chamonix, where he is writing his third novel, Genesis.

Writer and journalist Nicolas Truong is a regular contributor to the French daily, Le Monde.

Dr Merritt Turetsky is an internationally acclaimed climate scientist, renowned for her research and teaching on bogs. She's published hundreds of scientific articles on bogs' importance to global climate and provides counsel to governments, northern communities, and professional networks from around the world to better understand the importance of bogs to the global climate. Turetsky is a founding member and advisory board member of the international Permafrost Carbon Network, an advisor to NASA's Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, and from 2020-2022 she was named a Web of Science's Highly Cited Researcher. In addition to her published academic research, Dr Turetsky serves as the science advisor to the magazine EOS, has written for The Conversation, and regularly appears on TV including on CNN, PBS Newshour, BBC, and her own science program on Canada's CTV.

Giles Tillotson was Reader in History of Art at SOAS, University of London. He is now an independent writer and lecturer, living in Gurgaon near New Delhi. He is the author of many books on Indian architecture, history and landscape, including Jaipur Nama: Tales from the Pink City.

James Tooley is a professor of education policy at Newcastle university, where he directs the E. G. West Centre. He is currently chairman of education companies in Ghana and China creating embryonic chains of low cost private schools. He is the author of numerous books on education including The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves, and Educational Equality which he co-authored.

Jakow Trachtenberg was a Jewish mathematician who developed the mental calculation techniques called the Trachtenberg system. He was born in Odessa, the Russian empire in 1988 and worked as an engineer in the Obukhov arms factory. He was a dedicated pacifist and instrumental in organising the Society of Good Samaritans when the First World War broke out. After the Russian revolutions of 1917, Trachtenberg fled to the Weimar Republic where he was later critical of Nazi policies and imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II. He developed his system of mathematics during his imprisonment. He died in 1953.

Patrick Dacre Trevor-Roper (7 June 1916 – 22 April 2004) was a prominent British eye surgeon, author and pioneer gay rights activist, who played a leading role in the campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in the UK.