Contributors

Alice Albinia is the prize-winning author of two books, Empires of the Indus and Leela's Book: A Novel. RLF Fellow at King's College London, she has spent the past seven years living in and traveling around the edges of Britain, from Orkney to Anglesey, discovering female-centred epic stories which have inspired this novel and a work of non-fiction, The Britannias, due to be published by Allen Lane in 2022.

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf, and Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Fifteen Dogs won the 2016 Giller Prize, and The Hidden Keys was published in 2017.

John Aitchison is a wildlife filmmaker. His many awards include a joint BAFTA and a joint Primetime Creative Emmy both for the cinematography of the BBC series Frozen Planet.

Ash Ali is an award-winning serial tech entrepreneur and investor. As the first marketing director of Just Eat UK, a FTSE 100 startup that IPO'd for £1.5 billion, and with over 20 years of hands-on experience in launching, growing and advising startups, he is an outspoken patron of social mobility and continuous education. The Unfair Advantage is his first book.

Tom Allan has been working as a thatcher since 2012. Based in South Devon, he also writes for the Guardian (often about thatching) and the travel section of the Financial Times.

William Allison worked extensively in Fleet Street and for BBC television news.

Alan Allport is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Syracuse University. He is the author of three previous volumes of history, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded, Demobbed – winner of the 2010 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award – and Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941.

Ella Al-Shamahi is a National Geographic Explorer, paleoanthropologist, evolutionary biologist and stand-up comic. She specialises in Neanderthals, caves and expeditions in hostile, disputed and unstable territories. She is a TV presenter, a TED 2019 speaker and has taken 4 shows up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She has degrees in Genetics, Taxonomy and Biodiversity and is undertaking her PhD in Palaeoanthropology.

Shaikh Mohamed A. J. Althani was born in Qatar in 1962 and took a degree in industrial management from Central Michigan University. He worked in the oil and gas industry from 1985 to 2002. From 2004 to 2006 he was the Qatari Minister for Economy and Trade. He now runs a range of businesses involved in private equity, oil consultancy and construction. He is a member of the Middle East advisory board of the London Business School.

Anthony Alvarado has been a forest fire fighter, a high school science teacher, a library delivery truck driver, a telephone psychic, and a mental health counselor. He lives with a cat, a dog, and a girl in Portland, Oregon. When he is not doing magical experiments he spends his time writing and trying not to drink too much coffee.

Mats Alvesson is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Lund, Sweden. He has published extensively across a wide range of organisational behaviour topics and issues, is one of the most frequently cited European researchers in management and a sought-after speaker and commentator around the globe.

Roland Allen is a publisher and author who lives in Hove. He studied at Manchester University and works in book (and notebook) publishing. He has written about subjects as diverse as bicycles and bread, kept a diary for decades, and enjoys stationery a little too much.

Kamal Ahmed is an entrepreneur, author and journalist. He was formerly the editorial director of BBC News, and its economics editor until 2018. He has been the political editor of the Observer and the business editor of the Telegraph. He is the co-founder of The News Movement, a growing digital media organisation. The Trillionaires is his second book