Contributors

Mary Beard is the most acclaimed classicist working today. She is the Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge and is the Classics editor of the TLS. She is also the co-host, with Charlotte Higgins, of the podcast Instant Classics. Her previous books include the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii as well as Confronting the Classics, SPQR, Women & Power and Emperor of Rome. Her work has been published in over 35 languages.

Ernest Becker was born in Massachusetts to Jewish immigrant parents. After completing military service, in which he served in the infantry and helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he attended SyracuseUniversity in New York. In his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. The first of his nine books, Zen: A Rational Critique was published in 1961. He died in 1974 at the age of 49, two months before he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death.After his death, the Ernest Becker Foundation was founded, using Becker's ideas to support research in science, the humanities, social action and religion.

Nahid de Belgeonne, known as 'the nervous system whisperer', is a Somatic Movement Educator and breath and yoga teacher with a passion for sharing the healing benefits of movement. She has been a pivotal part of the London fitness landscape for 15 years, operating the yoga and wellbeing brand Good Vibes and now focuses on private clients with her somatic and restorative system called The Human Method. She has been featured in publications including The Times, Harpers Bazaar, Tatler and Stylist.

Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author, specialising in Georgian art and architecture. Born in Toronto, she later emigrated to the UK to pursue an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a PhD from the University of York in art history. Upon completing her studies, she moved to the Isle of Bute off the Western coast of Scotland, and worked as a curator at Mount Stuart, a late Victorian Gothic Revival palace. When she isn't visiting haunted houses and recording her ghost story-themed history podcast, Haunted Homes, Caitlin is based in East Sussex.

Nicholson Baker was born in New York City in 1957 and grew up in Rochester. In his many works of fiction and nonfiction (including Vox, Checkpoint and Human Smoke), he has written about John Updike, about getting up early in the morning, about the inner life of a nine-year-old girl, about a man on his lunch hour, about the beginnings of the Second World War, about sex, and many other subjects too numerous to list here. Travelling Sprinkler is his tenth novel and his fifteenth book. He lives in Maine with his family.

Tina Baker was brought up in a caravan after her mother, a fairground traveller, fell pregnant by a window cleaner. After leaving the bright lights of Coalville, she came to London and worked as a journalist and broadcaster for thirty years. She's probably best known as a television critic for the BBC and GMTV, and for winning Celebrity Fit Club. Her debut novel, Call Me Mummy, was a #1 Kindle bestseller and featured on Lorraine. As well as Call Me Mummy, she is the author of Nasty Little Cuts, Make Me Clean and What We Did in the Storm.

Bandi is the Korean word for firefly. It is the pseudonym of an anonymous dissident writer still living in North Korea.

Lester Bangs started out as a record reviewer for Rolling Stone, went on to write for and then edit the magazine Creem, before moving to New York and covering the burgeoning punk scene, writing in daily newspapers and the Village Voice. Bangs died suddenly at the age of 33 in 1982. A biography of Lester Bangs, Let it Blurt was published in 2001.

Marta Barone was born in Turin in 1987. She is a translator and a freelance editor. Her novel Sunken City, translated into six languages, was shortlisted for the Strega Prize and won the Vittorini and Fiesole Prizes. She is also the author of several children's books.

Born in 1958, Neil Bartlett has spent twenty-five years at the cutting edge of British gay culture. His ground-breaking study of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? paved the way for a queer re-imagining of history ; his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was voted Capital Gay Book of The Year; his second, Mr Clive and Mr Page, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. Both have since been translated into five European languages. Listing him as one of the country's fifty most significant gay cultural figures, the Independent said "Brilliant,beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility". He also works as a director, and in 2000 was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre.

Born in 1972 in Saarbrücken, Rüdiger Barth studied Contemporary History and General Rhetoric in Tübingen. After 15 years as a journalist for the German weekly Stern, he now works as a freelance author.