Programme

Sarah Day

Sarah Day has written nine collections of poems. Her books have received the Anne Elder and Queensland Premier’s Awards and Wesley Michel Wright Prizes, and have been shortlisted for the NSW, Tasmanian Premier’s – including 2025 for Slack Tide – and Prime Minister’s Literary awards. She was poetry editor of Island Magazine for seven years. She taught creative writing to year 12 students for twenty years, has collaborated with musicians, and judged national poetry, fiction, and nature-writing competitions. Her poem “The Orphan” was shortlisted for this year’s Peter Porter international poetry prize. She lives in Tasmania.

Dr Patricia Fara

The highly acclaimed historian of science, Dr Patricia Fara, is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. She was President of the British Society for the History of Science from 2016 to 2018 and is currently President of the Antiquarian Horological Society. Winner of the 2022 Abraham Pais award of the American Physical Society, she has published numerous books, including the prize-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History (2009) (which has been translated into nine languages), as well as Life after Gravity: Isaac Newton’s London Career (2021) and A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in The First World War (2018).

Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah is a No. 1 bestselling crime writer, and the author of the new Hercule Poirot mysteries, at the request of Agatha Christie’s family and estate. Her books are published in 51 countries and have sold more than five million copies worldwide. She won the UK National Book Awards Crime Novel of the Year prize in 2013, and the Dagger in the Library Award in 2023. Her murder mystery musical, ‘The Mystery of Mr E’ is available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV now. Sophie is the founder and coach at Dream Author Coaching.

Kate Macdonald

Kate Macdonald is an editor, writer, literary historian, former university lecturer and most recently a publisher. She founded Handheld Press in 2017 after a career hopping between editing and teaching and researching twentieth-century publishing history and popular culture. After eight years Handheld was wound down and now Kate has more time to read for pleasure and write for fun.

Simon Lewis

Simon has a long career in strategic communications, including roles on the Executive Committees of Centrica and Vodafone as Director of Corporate Affairs. He has a longstanding interest in both education and social mobility, having chaired the UK-US Fulbright Commission from 2009–13 and currently is the Chair of Young Enterprise. He was awarded an OBE in 2014 for services to international education. He also was the first Communication Secretary to the late Queen and Director of Communications and Official Spokesman at Number 10 for Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Alex Macbeth

Alex is a freelance journalist, editor, writer and startup founder based between the United Kingdom and Italy. He is the author of the crime fiction novel THE RED DIE.

Alex also founded Festival Fim do Caminho, a film and literature festival, and Ethale Publishing Lda, a publishing house – both in Mozambique – and more recently Innofund, a ‘blockchain for good’ company.

Lisa St Aubin de Terán

Anglo-Guyanese writer, Lisa St Aubin de Terán FRSL, was born and brought up in London. Aged 16, she married a Venezuelan landowner, and after 2 years in Italy, she spent 7 years farming in the Venezuelan Andes. On her return, with daughter, Iseult, she settled in Norfolk with poet, George Macbeth.

In 1985, she moved to Italy with their son, Alex, and married the painter, Robbie Duff-Scott. Then 20 years later she moved to rural Mozambique to set up community projects .

She has published 21 books, translated into 14 languages, with the latest (after an 18-year gap) being her autobiography, Better Broken than New, and a novel, The Hobby. She now lives on a houseboat in London. Her work is based on the oral tradition.

Dr Helen Pilcher

Dr Helen Pilcher is an author, speaker and science communication consultant. She likes drinking tea and writing books about science. Life Changing: How Humans are Changing Life on Earth was The Times 2020 Science Book of the Year. Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction was Radio 2’s ‘Fact not Fiction’ book of the week. Her latest book is The Time Nature Keeps.

Helen is also a lapsed neuroscientist, with a PhD in stem cell biology. Unusually for a self-proclaimed geek, Helen also used to be a stand-up comedian before the arrival of children meant she was unable to stay awake past 9pm.

Rachel Hore

Rachel Hore is the Sunday Times bestselling author of fourteen novels. The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge, published in July, is set in contemporary Norfolk and postwar London and inspired by a real-life story. She is married to the writer D.J. Taylor and lives in Norwich.

Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry is the author of novels including Enlightenment, Melmoth, and The Essex Serpent, which was adapted into a TV series starring Tom Hiddleston and Clare Danes. She has been nominated for a number of literary awards including the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize, the Folio Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and she is a winner of the British Book Awards and the Waterstones Book Prize.

She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the Chancellor of the University of Essex. Her essays and literary criticism have appeared in publications including the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, and her work has been translated into 27 languages.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, and a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority. He is a regular media commentator on statistical issues, and was very busy over the Covid crisis.

His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics, was published in 2019, and The Art of Uncertainty in 2024. His career highlights include appearing on Desert Island Discs in 2022, and in 2011 coming 7^th in an episode of BBC1’s Winter Wipeout.

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, awarded an OBE in 2006, and knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017–2018, and has been a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority since 2020.

Lachlan Mackinnon

Lachlan Mackinnon was born in 1956 and lives in Ely. For many years he worked as a schoolmaster. He has been a regular contributor to the national press as critic and obituarist for over forty years, principally to the Times Literary Supplement and The Independent, but also to The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, Quarto and Poetry Review.

He has written books about Baudelaire and modern poetry, Shakespeare, and the Russo-French novelist Elsa Triolet. He has published six collections of poetry, most recently The Missing Months (Faber, 2022). He has received an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award.

D.J. Taylor

D.J. Taylor has written 13 novels, including Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography.

His recent works include Flame Music (2023), Orwell: The New Life (2023), and Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (2024). His most recent book is Poppyland, a collection of short stories (2025).

Iseult Teran

Born and raised on a farm in Venezuela at the foothills of the Andes, Iseult wrote her first book Dolce Vita at the age of sixteen, inspired by entries from her diary, before moving to Paris. After returning to Venezuela to live with her father on their family farm until his passing, she began a lifelong journey as a peace-preneur and activist.

Iseult began writing and illustrating children’s books centred on peacebuilding and love called Peacefreaks. Her work has expanded into the creation of an animated TV series with the same name.

Sir Anthony Seldon

Sir Anthony Seldon is a widely-respected authority on all matters relating to education, AI, Number 10 and Britain’s prime ministers. His first book on a prime minister, Churchill’s Indian Summer, was published forty years ago. He has since written or edited more than 50 books, many of which are best-sellers, including definitive insider accounts of the last seven prime ministers.

Sir Anthony served as honorary historian of Number 10 Downing Street, chair of the National Archives Trust, and has interviewed most of the senior figures who have worked in Number 10 in the last fifty years. His most recent books are – The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way (2022), Johnson at 10: The Inside Story (2023) and Truss at 10: How Not to Be Prime Minister (2024).

Camilla Balshaw

Her debut memoir, NAMED: A Story of Names and Reclaiming Who We Are, was published by Bedford Square in June 2025. Camilla has written for newspapers and journals, including The Guardian and The Observer. In 2020, she was shortlisted for Penguin Random House’s award-winning Write Now programme, which aims to nurture and support new writers.

She was recently appointed an Honorary Research Fellow in Name Studies at the University of Nottingham. When she is not writing, Camilla teaches yoga and creative writing and mentors emerging writers.