An A-Z of the speakers at the 7-14 September 2022 Chiswick Book Festival is here
Scroll down for details of the speakers at our Children’s Book Festival, Local Authors Party, Workshops & Walks and Chairs. Watch for updates.
Ellen Alpsten (The Tsarina’s Daughter)
Ellen Alpsten was born and raised in the Kenyan highlands, before attending L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. Whilst studying for her Msc in PPE she won the Grande École short story competition with her novella Meeting Mr. Gandhi and was encouraged to continue writing. Upon graduating, she worked as a producer and presenter for Bloomberg TV in London. Her debut novel Tsarina was published in hardback by Bloomsbury in 2020 and longlisted for the Authors Club Best First Novel Award. The Tsarina’s Daughter continues the incredible journey of these historical figures – women who have often been overlooked in literature. She contributes to international publications such as Vogue, Standpoint and Conde Nast Traveller.
Adam Andrusier (Two Hitlers and a Marilyn)
Adam Andrusier is a writer living in North West London. He studied music at Cambridge and completed the creative writing MA at UEA. He is a professional dealer of rare and valuable autographs and his work provided the inspiration for Zadie Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man. His debut, Two Hitlers and a Marilyn is drawn on his childhood as an obsessive autograph collector and will be published in 2021.
Ed Balls (Appetite)
Ed Balls is a broadcaster, writer and economist. He is Professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London and a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, co-Chair of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and Vice-President and former Chairman of Norwich City Football Club. In his political career, Ed was an MP from 2005 to 2015 and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer between 2011 and 2015. On radio and TV, he is best known for winning the BBC One series Celebrity Best Home Cook ̧ his series Travels in Trumpland with Ed Balls, his appearance on the 2016 series of Strictly Come Dancing and his regular broadcasts on BBC’s The One Show, Radio 2 and Radio 4. His 2016 book Speaking Out: Lessons in Life and Politics was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller.
Gyles Brandreth (Odd Boy Out)
Gyles Brandreth is an English theatre producer, actor, politician, journalist, author and TV presenter. Born in Germany, he moved to London at the age of three and, after his education at New College, Oxford, he began his career in television. He went from presenting Puzzle Party in the 1970s, to appearing in Countdown’s Dictionary Corner for over 300 episodes. His career has since encompassed becoming an MP and appearing regularly on TV and radio, but writing is his true passion. His past books include the bestselling Have You Eaten Grandma?, Dancing by the Light of the Moon, Word Play, Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries.
Elizabeth Buchan (Two Women in Rome)
Elizabeth Buchan was a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prizewinning Consider the Lily, international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman and The New Mrs Clifton. She reviews for the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She was a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award.
Louise Candlish (The Heights)
Louise Candlish is the Sunday Times bestselling author of fifteen novels. Her 2018 thriller Our House, which has sold over 250,000 copies in the UK to date, was a #1 bestseller in paperback, ebook and audiobook and winner of the Crime & Thriller Book of the Year at the 2019 British Book Awards. It is soon to be a major ITV drama series made by Death in Paradise producers Red Planet Pictures. Those People (2019) was a #2 Sunday Times bestseller in paperback and is in development for TV by Company Pictures. The Other Passenger (2020) is a Sunday Times bestseller in paperback and under option for a feature film with Moving Image Productions.
Rory Cellan-Jones (Always On)
Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC’s technology correspondent. From the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s to the rise of Google and Facebook, from the Psion organiser to the iPad, he’s covered all the big gadget and business stories. Dot.Rory, his previous blog, was named among the Top 100 blogs by the Sunday Times. Rory has been described as “the non-geek’s geek” and aims to look at the impact of the internet and digital technology on our lives and businesses.
Mary Chamberlain (The Forgotten)
Mary Chamberlain is a novelist and historian. Her debut novel, The Dressmaker of Dachau, was published in 18 countries. She is the author of non-fiction books on women’s history and Caribbean history, including Fenwomen, the first book published by Virago Press.
Tom Chivers (London Clay: Journeys into the Deep City)
Tom Chivers is a writer and publisher. He is the author of two pamphlets and two full collections of poetry, and is director of the independent press Penned in the Margins. In 2008 he was the Bishopsgate Institute’s first writer in residence, and in 2012 he worked with climate arts organisation Cape Farewell to make ADRIFT, an exploration of the urban environment through poetry, creative non-fiction and performance. The project culminated in a series of audio walking tours along two of London’s lost rivers, which were commissioned by Bishopsgate Institute and Southbank Centre and sold out within days. They were reprised for the Thames Festival in 2014 and 2015. Chivers is currently an Associate Artist of the National Centre for Writing.
Marika Cobbold (On Hampstead Heath)
Marika Cobbold was born with newspaper ink flowing through her veins. She used to visit her father and grandfather at their offices at the Gothenburg-Post, the Swedish broadsheet her grandfather had rescued from oblivion decades earlier. At home, when Marika wasn’t reading, she listened as the grown-ups around her discussed the issues of the day, and to the stories told by her mother and great aunt, who was a writer. She left Sweden for England when she was nineteen, with vague plans of studying law, but eventually what her grandfather called ‘the family curse’ caught up with her, and some years later she wrote her first novel, Guppies For Tea. She has been writing ever since.
Charles Cumming (JUDUS 62)
Charles Cumming was born in Scotland in 1971. Shortly after university, he was
approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), an experience that
inspired his first novel, A Spy by Nature. He has written several bestselling thrillers,
including A Foreign Country which won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best
Thriller and the Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year.
Victoria Daskal (wine-tasting – A Gentleman in Moscow)
Victoria Daskal is a wine writer, educator, and judge with over 14 years of experience. She was most recently the Managing Editor of The World of Fine Wine magazine and is currently studying for the Masters of Wine exam. She founded Mummy Wine Club, a successful West London wine tastings company in 2018, which evolved into a UK wine subscription club in 2020. Further inspired to show wine through the lens of cuisine, history, geography, literature, gardening, music, and more, Victoria launched a new company called Cellar d’Or to combine her passion for truly unique wine experiences.
Dr Jim Down (Life Support)
Dr Jim Down is a consultant in critical care and anaesthesia at University College London Hospitals. He chairs the ICU consultants’ group, the department of anaesthesia weekly scientific meetings, and the UCLH Trust guideline committee. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he has been on a new full-time, full-shift clinical rota for ICU, and was appointed Trust Lead for Ethics. This is his first book.
Robin Duval (Going to America)
Robin Duval was born in Liverpool. The greater part of his career has been spent in the film and television business as a writer, producer and executive. From 1999 to 2004 he was Director of the British Board of Film Classification. He received a CBE in 2005. He lives in Ealing with his wife and now combines writing with music, travel and watching Brentford FC. His first three books were all fast-moving political thrillers set against an international backdrop. Bear in the Woods was published in 2010, followed by Below the Thunder in 2013 and Not Single Spies in 2015. His latest novel, Going to America, published earlier this year, explores a quite different theme.
Jessica Fellowes (The Mitford Murders)
Jessica Fellowes is an author, journalist and public speaker. The Mitford Murders is her debut series as a novelist and has been nominated for awards in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and sold into eighteen territories. Jessica is also the author of five official companion books to Downton Abbey, various of which hit the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists. She has written short stories for Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue, and made numerous appearances on radio, podcasts and television.
Luan Goldie (Homecoming)
Luan Goldie is a primary school teacher, and formerly a business journalist. She has written several short stories and is the winner of the Costa Short Story Award 2017 for her short story ‘Two Steak Bakes and Two Chelsea Buns’. She was also shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize in 2018 and the Grazia/Orange First Chapter competition in 2012, and was chosen to take part in the Almasi League, an Arts Council-funded mentorship programme for emerging writers of colour. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the h100 awards in the Publishing and Writing category. Her debut novel, Nightingale Point, is longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and it was also a Radio 2 Book Club pick. Homecoming is her second novel.
Peter Hanington (A Cursed Place)
Peter Hanington is the author of A Dying Breed and A Single Source. He has worked as a journalist for over twenty-five years, including fourteen years at the Today Programme and more recently The World Tonight and Newshour on the BBC World Service. He went to Chiswick Community School.
Louise Hare (This Lovely City)
Louise Hare is a London-based writer and has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. Originally from Warrington, the capital is the inspiration for much of her work, including This Lovely City, which began life after a trip into the deep level shelter below Clapham Common.
Roger Hermiston (Two Minutes to Midnight)
Roger Hermiston’s previous books were the acclaimed All Behind You, Winston, the compelling story of the men and women in Churchill’s government who helped win the war; The Greatest Traitor, a biography of the Cold War spy George Blake; and Clough and Revie, the story of the fierce rivalry between those two great football managers. Roger was a print and broadcast journalist before turning to full-time writing. He was a reporter and feature writer on the Yorkshire Post before joining the BBC in the early 1990s. The bulk of his career at the corporation was devoted to the Radio 4 Today programme, where he was assistant editor from 1999 to 2010.
Rowan Hooper (How to Spend a Trillion Dollars)
Rowan Hooper is a senior editor at New Scientist magazine and host of the New Scientist Weekly podcast. After gaining a PhD in evolutionary biology, he moved to Japan and worked in a conservation biology lab, then a national newspaper in Tokyo, then Trinity College Dublin in a nanophysics lab. He is the author of Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Mental and Physical Ability. His work has been published in the Guardian, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Wired and The Economist. He lives in London with his partner and two daughters.
Alan Johnson (Late Train to Gipsy Hill)
Alan Johnson’s childhood memoir This Boy was published in 2013. It won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the Orwell Prize, Britain’s top political writing award. His second volume of memoirs Please Mr Postman (2014) won the National Book Club award for Best Biography. The final book in his memoir trilogy, The Long and Winding Road (2016) won the Parliamentary Book Award for Best Memoir. Alan was a Labour MP for 20 years before retiring ahead of the 2017 general election. He served in five cabinet positions in the Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown including Education Secretary, Health Secretary and Home Secretary.
Dr Amir Khan (The Doctor Will See You Now)
Dr Amir Khan is a full-time GP living in the UK. He is a GP Trainer, an Honorary Senior Lecturer at both Bradford and Leeds University, as well as being on the advisory board for the School of Pharmacy and Practice Managers Association. He has appeared on TV shows such as GPs Behind Closed Doors, How to Lose a Stone for Summer and Why Can’t I Sleep? Amir is also a regular on ITV’s Lorraine, Good Morning Britain, and numerous other news outlets, providing advice and insight on the coronavirus.
Suzette Lewellyn (Still Breathing)
Suzette Llewellyn, the co-editor of Still Breathing, is now filming and has had to withdraw.
Suzannah Lipscomb (What is History, Now?)
Suzannah Lipscomb is an award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster. She is Professor of History at the University of Roehampton, a Fellow of the Royal Historical History, and a columnist for History Today. She is the author of five books on the sixteenth century and has written and hosted over 40 hours of historical documentaries for TV.
Andrew Lownie (Traitor King)
Andrew Lownie was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was Dunster History Prizeman and President of the Union, before taking his Masters and doctorate at Edinburgh University. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and former visiting fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, he has run his own literary agency since 1988. A trustee of the Campaign for Freedom of Information and President of The Biographers’ Club, he has written for The Times, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Spectator and Guardian. His previous biographies include lives of the writer John Buchan and the prize-winning Stalin’s Englishman on the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess. Lownie’s previous book with Bonnier Books UK, The Mountbattens, was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Waterstones Book of the Year.
Iain MacGregor (Checkpoint Charlie)
Iain MacGregor is an editor and publisher of nonfiction in the UK. His father served with the British Army on the Rhine in the 1950s, and enjoyed R&R in West Berlin. As a student he visited the Baltic and the Soviet Union, avidly followed events that unfolded in Berlin on the night of 9th November 1989 when the Wall fell and then later travelled through into the former Warsaw Pact territories and Berlin, visiting Checkpoint Charlie, still untouched.
Miranda Malins (The Puritan Princess)
Miranda Malins is a writer and historian specialising in the history of Oliver Cromwell, his family and the politics of the Interregnum period following the Civil Wars. She studied at Cambridge University, leaving with a PhD, and continues to speak at conferences and publish journal articles and book reviews. She is also a Trustee of the Cromwell Association. Alongside this, Miranda works as a commercial solicitor in the City and began writing historical novels on maternity leave. The Puritan Princess is her debut novel.
Sarfraz Manzoor (They)
Sarfraz Manzoor is a journalist, author and broadcaster. He has written and presented documentaries for BBC radio and television, and is a regular columnist for the Guardian, the Sunday Times Magazine and The Times. His first book, Greetings from Bury Park, was published to critical acclaim. In 2019, it was adapted for the big screen and released around the world under the name Blinded by the Light.
Tim Marshall (Power of Geography)
Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than 30 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from 40 countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestsellers Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics and Divided: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls; Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags; and Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire. He is founder and editor of the current affairs site TheWhatandtheWhy.com.
Andrew Mitchell (Beyond a Fringe)
Andrew Mitchell was educated at Rugby and Jesus College, Cambridge. He was an officer in the 1st Royal Tank Regiment, serving with the United Nations military forces in Cyprus. Prior to entering Parliament, he worked for Lazard in London. As the MP for Gedling from 1987 to 1997, he served in John Major’s government, including in the Whips’ Office during the notorious Maastricht debates. Re-elected to the House of Commons for Royal Sutton Coldfield in 2001, he served as Secretary of State for International Development from 2010 to 2012 and as Chief Whip in 2012. Having resigned from the government over the ‘Plebgate’ saga, he is now a fellow at Cambridge University, a visiting fellow at Harvard University and an honorary professor at the University of Birmingham.
Emily Mortimer (Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love)
Emily Mortimer is an actress, screenwriter, and director, the daughter of the writer and barrister Sir John Mortimer. She began acting in stage productions and has appeared in many film and television roles. In 2003, she won an Independent Spirit Award for her performance in Lovely and Amazing. She is also known for playing the role of Mackenzie McHale in the HBO series The Newsroom. She created and wrote the TV series Doll & Em (2014-15) and wrote and directed the miniseries The Pursuit of Love (2021) based on the novel of the same name.
Amita Murray (The Trouble with Rose)
Amita Murray is a novelist, based in London. The first of her quirky Arya Winters mystery series is coming out with Polis Books in October 2021. Described as Fleabag meets Agatha Christie, it features a brand new mixed-race amateur detective whose only conundrum in life is how to get away from Other People. Her novel The Trouble with Rose came out with Harper Collins in 2019. Her collection Marmite and Mango Chutney won the SI Leeds Literary Prize in 2016 and stories have been published in Wasafiri, Sand Berlin, Aesthetica, Brand, the Berkeley Fiction Review and others. Amita has been writer in residence at Plymouth University/Literature Works and University College London/Leverhulme and taught creative writing at the University of East Anglia, New College of the Humanities and Citylit.
Samantha Norman (Death and the Maiden)
Samantha Norman is the daughter of novelist Ariana Franklin. A successful feature writer, columnist, and film critic, she lives in London.
Bridget Osborne (The Chiswick Calendar)
Bridget Osborne is the editor of The Chiswick Calendar, which she set up as a celebration of life in Chiswick, after a long career as a news and current affairs producer for the BBC.
Suzanne Packer (Still Breathing)
Suzanne Packer is an actress, known for playing the role of Tess Bateman in the BBC medical drama Casualty from 2003 to 2015, returning as a guest for the 30th anniversary episodes. She has since appeared in various TV including Bang, In My Skin and The Pembrokeshire Murders. In 1991, Packer co-founded BiBi Crew, Britain’s first theatre troupe made up entirely of Black women and in 2021 she co-edited Still Breathing: 100 Black Voices on Racism.
Gill Paul (The Collector’s Daughter)
Gill Paul is an author of historical fiction, specialising in the twentieth century and often writing about the lives of real women. Her novels have topped bestseller lists in the US and Canada as well as the UK and have been translated into twenty-one languages. The Secret Wife has sold over half a million copies and is a book-club favourite worldwide. She is also the author of several non-fiction books on historical subjects. She lives in London and swims year-round in a wild pond. The Collector’s Daughter is her tenth novel.
Charlotte Philby (Part of the Family)
Charlotte Philby worked for the Independent for eight years as a columnist, editor and reporter, and was shortlisted for the Cudlipp Prize for her investigative journalism at the 2013 Press Awards. A former contributing editor and feature writer at Marie Claire, she has written for the New Statesman, Elle, the Telegraph, Guardian and Sunday Times, and presented documentaries for the BBC World Service and The One Show. Charlotte is the granddaughter of Kim Philby, Britain’s most infamous communist double-agent, the elusive ‘third man’ in the notorious Cambridge spy ring. This is her third novel.
Stuart Prebble (Black and Blue)
Stuart Prebble was for many years a leading television journalist, notably on ITV’s World in Action programme, and later became CEO of ITV. He is now a successful producer and writer.
Alvin Rakoff (I’m Just The Guy Who Says Action)
Alvin Rakoff directed more than 100 film, television and theatre productions. Now in his 10th decade and still active, this multi-award winning director has worked with many of the world’s most prestigious leading talents including Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers, Rex Harrison, Rod Steiger, John Gielgud, Henry Fonda, Ava Gardner. He gave an unknown extra his first leading role: Sean Connery. He gave a young drama student his first job: Alan Rickman. Other young talents nurtured include Michael Crawford, Judi Dench, Jeremy Irons, Michael Caine. Among many awards and nominations, he is twice winner of the coveted Emmy Award for A Voyage Round My Father (Laurence Olivier) and Call Me Daddy (Donald Pleasance). Born in Canada, his early days as a journalist helped him work his way to a degree at University of Toronto. In 1952 he was seconded by CBC to the BBC in London
Nicola Rayner (You and Me)
Nicola Rayner is the author of The Girl Before You, which was described as “the new Girl on the Train” by the Observer, picked by the same newspaper as a debut to look out for in 2019 and translated into multiple languages. Her second novel, You and Me, another psychological thriller, was published by Avon, HarperCollins in October 2020. In her day job as a journalist, Nicola writes about dance and travel and her articles have appeared in a number of publications including the Guardian, the Independent, Time Out and Dancing Times. The Girl Before You and You and Me are out now in paperback, ebook and audiobook.
Cathy Rentzenbrink (Everyone is Still Alive)
Cathy Rentzenbrink grew up in Yorkshire, spent many years in London, and now lives in Cornwall. She is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Last Act of Love, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize, and the acclaimed memoirs A Manual for Heartache and Dear Reader. Everyone Is Still Alive is her first novel.
Steve Richards (The Prime Ministers We Never Had)
Steve Richards is a political columnist, journalist, and presenter. He regularly presents The Week in Westminster on BBC Radio 4 and has presented BBC radio series on Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. He also presented the BBC TV programmes Leadership Reflections: The Modern Prime Ministers and Reflections: The Prime Ministers We Never Had, unscripted talks recorded in a single take. Similarly for book festivals he brings to life the characters and epic political dramas that define our age. He has written columns for several national newspapers including the Guardian, the Independent and the Financial Times. He also presents a popular political one man show each year at the Edinburgh Festival and across the UK.
Jacqueline Riding (Hogarth: Life in Progress)
Dr Jacqueline Riding is a historian and art historian specialising in British history and art of the long eighteenth century. Former curator of the Palace of Westminster and Director of the Handel House Museum, she is an award-winning author of books such as Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre as well as a consultant for museums, galleries, historic buildings and feature films. She was the adviser on Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014), Peterloo (2018) and Wash Westmoreland’s Colette (2018).
Parm Sandhu (Black and Blue)
Parm Sandhu joined the police in 1989 and rose through the ranks to become the highest ranking female Asian officer in the Metropolitan Police Service. Among many honours, Parm has been awarded Asian Woman of the Year, the Vasakhi Award (Mayor of London) and Sikh Women of Distinction (Sikh Women’s Alliance).
Anne Sebba (Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy)
Anne Sebba is one of Britain’s most distinguished biographers. Formerly a Reuters correspondent based in London and Rome, she has written ten works of non-fiction, mostly about iconic women, and presented BBC radio documentaries. She is the author of the international bestseller That Woman, a biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. Sebba read History at King’s College London and her first job was at the BBC World Service in the Arabic Department. Her previous book, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940’s won the Franco-British Society prize and film rights have been sold, with a multi episode TV drama planned. She has written many other critically acclaimed books of non-fiction, mostly about iconic women who enjoyed using power and influence in different ways such as Enid Bagnold, Mother Teresa, Laura Ashley and Jennie Churchill.
Mary Ann Sieghart (The Authority Gap)
Mary Ann Sieghart spent 20 years as a senior editor and columnist at The Times and won a large following for her columns on politics, economics, feminism, parenthood and life in general. She has presented many programmes on BBC Radio 4, such as Start the Week, Fallout, Profile, Analysis, One to One and a clutch of one-off documentaries. Most recently she presented Fallout, a series of Radio 4 programmes on the possible outcomes of the Coronavirus.
Susan Spindler (Surrogate)
Susan Spindler is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. She worked for the BBC on flagship series such as Horizon, Tomorrow’s World and QED and went on to be become Deputy Director of Drama, Entertainment & Children’s Programmes. Surrogate is her first novel.
Corinne Sweet (2 Minutes To Sleep)
Corinne Sweet is an author, psychotherapist, psychologist and broadcaster. She has published 18 titles, including popular psychology bestsellers, such as Change Your Life with CBT (Pearson), The Anxiety Journal and The Mindfulness Journal (Pan MacMillan). Corinne trained on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, was a magazine and newspaper Agony Aunt and a Big Brother psychologist. She appears regularly on TV and Radio, collaborating frequently with BBC Breakfast and BBC Radio Scotland. Corinne writes blogs regularly at www.corinnesweet.com/blog. She is a working single mum and has been a meditator and mindfulness user for over 25 years.
Kate Teltscher (Palace of Palms)
Kate Teltscher is an Emeritus Fellow of the School of Humanities at the University of Roehampton, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Visiting Researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. As a cultural historian, her research has focused on colonial contact between Britain and Asia and she is the author of two acclaimed books, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600-1800 and The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama and the First British Expedition to Tibet, which was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.
Jane Thynne – as CJ Carey (Widowland)
Jane Thynne writes: After school in Hampton, I spent a year working at the Old Vic Theatre before reading English at St Anne’s College, Oxford.I then joined the BBC as a production trainee, learning to direct and produce all kinds of TV programmes from drama to current affairs. But after a few years, I succumbed to a hankering for Fleet Street and moved to The Sunday Times. I also broadcast on BBC Radio 4, where I had my own series. I spent many exhilarating years at The Daily Telegraph as media correspondent, but my single most exciting moment in that time was getting a publishing contract for my first novel. In particular I have a passion for historical fiction and love the research that involves. The first in the Clara Vine series, Black Roses, became a number One Kindle Bestseller. Outside Britain, my novels have been translated into French, German, Greek, Turkish and Italian. As well as writing books I now freelance as a journalist, writing regularly for numerous British magazines and newspapers, and also appear as a broadcaster on Radio 4 and Sky. I have been a guest reader at the Arvon Foundation, sat on the broadcasting committee of the Society of Authors and I’m a patron of the Wimbledon Bookfest.
Nancy Tucker (The First Day of Spring)
Nancy Tucker recently graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Experimental Psychology. She currently works in an NHS mental health unit. Her memoir of her childhood struggle with anorexia, The Time in Between, was published in 2015. Her follow-up, That Was When People Started to Worry, an examination of young women’s mental health, was published in 2018. The First Day of Spring is her first work of fiction.
Saz Vora (Made in Heaven)
Saz Vora is a wife, mother and writer. She was born in East Africa and migrated with her family in the ‘60s to Coventry, Midlands, where she grew up straddling British and Gujarati Indian culture. Her debut novels, My Heart Sings Your Song and Where Have We Come, is a story in two parts of love, life, family, conflict, and two young people striving to remain together throughout. Where Have We Come (Finalist, The Wishing Shelf Book Awards 2020), is based on true events that have shaped her outlook on life’s trials and tribulations. Her short story, Broad Street Library, was longlisted in Spread the Word, Life Writing Prize 2020. Before writing South Asian melodrama, she had a successful career in Television Production and Teaching… But her need to write stories has led to what she is doing now – writing stories about people like her in multi-cultural Britain.
John Walsh (Anthony Burgess panel)
John Walsh began his journalistic career selling advertising space in The Tablet to nuns. Since then he’s been literary editor of three newspapers, a contributor to scores of magazines from the New Yorker to Mojo, and spent 20 years as a columnist, feature writer, food critic and interviewer on the Independent. He was director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in the late 1990s, and for 17 years could be heard on the Radio 4 literary quiz show, The Write Stuff.
Sharon Walters (Still Breathing)
Sharon Walters is a London-based artist and project curator whose work empowers black women to ‘take up space’, be seen, and create their own spaces. When blackness is so often represented as ‘other’, Sharon offers an alternative narrative of empowerment. ‘Seeing Ourselves’, her ongoing series, is an exploration of identity, beauty standards, and race through celebratory papercuts and hand-assembled collages. Sharon’s celebratory approach extends through to her workshop and curatorial work, which continues to explore the representation of black women in many arenas, including arts, heritage and media. Sharon reframes these representations to share her experiences as black woman in an uplifting light.
Pat Younge (Still Breathing)
Pat Younge is an award-winning journalist and creative leader who includes being Chief Creative Officer for BBC Television productions and leading a major American cable network as highlights in his 30-year career. Born in Peckham, and one of three boys raised by a single mother in Stevenage, he now runs a production company called Cardiff Productions and calls Ealing home.
Kim Ansell, Lisa Read (Frederick the Fox)
Zoe Antoniades (Cally & Jimmy: Twintastic)
Zoe Antoniades was born in West London of Greek Cypriot parents. She graduated from the University of Hull with a degree in English and Drama and trained as a teacher at the Institute of Education. She has taught English and the arts and worked on a wide range of creative projects in partnership with the Southbank Centre, the Royal Albert Hall, the Young Vic and the Polka Theatre. With Andersen Press, Zoe has recently launched a brand-new series of stories for children about twins, Cally & Jimmy. The first title, Twins in Trouble was published in September 2020 and the second, Twintastic, in April 2021. The third, Twins Together is out in February 2022. Zoe also writes collaboratively with young people and has published four anthologies of short stories: Invincible Voices – Long Shorts, Medium Shorts, Short Shorts and Winter Shorts. Her memoir, Tea and Baklavas, won the Winchester Writers’ Festival Memoir Prize.
Clare Balding (Fall Off, Get Back On, Keep Going)
Clare Balding is an award-winning broadcaster and writer. She has been a lead presenter for the Olympics, Paralympics, Winter Olympics, Wimbledon, the Commonwealth Games and Crufts on the BBC and Channel 4. For more than twenty years, she has hiked across the countryside for the BBC Radio 4 series Ramblings.Clare is also a best-selling author whose titles include Number 1 bestseller, My Animals and Other Family, which won the National Book Awards Autobiography of the Year. She has written three novels for children, and for adults a non-fiction book called Heroic Animals: 100 Amazing Creatures Great and Small. Her latest book, Fall Off, Get Back On, Keep Going is a motivational guide to resilience and self-belief for children. It is also a Sunday Times bestseller.
Rob Biddulph (Peanut Jones and the Illustrated City)
Rob Biddulph is a bestselling and multi award-winning author/illustrator. He was the official World Book Day Illustrator for 2019, 2020 and 2021. He is the author of many highly, acclaimed, award-winning picture books, including Blown Away, GRRRRR!, Odd Dog Out, Sunk, Kevin, Show and Tell, Dog Gone and the Dinosaur Juniors series.
In March 2020 he started #DrawWithRob, a series of twice-weekly draw-along videos designed to help parents whose children were forced to stay home from school due to the Covid 19 pandemic. #DrawWithRob became an internet sensation, garnering national and international media coverage, and has been used as a learning resource by thousands of families across the globe. In 2020 he broke the Guinness World Record for the largest ever online art class when 45,611 people tuned in to his live #DrawWithRob YouTube class.
Before he became a full-time author/illustrator Rob was the art director of the Observer Magazine, NME, Uncut, SKY and Just Seventeen. He lives in London with his wife and three daughters and hasn’t given up hope that, maybe, one of them will go to an Arsenal match with him one day. Peanut Jones and the Illustrated City is his fiction debut and the first title in a major series.
Really Big Pants Theatre Company (Clare and Cory Share a (Glorious) Story)
Sam Copeland (Charlie Changes..)
Sam Copeland is an author, which has come as something of a shock to him. He is from Manchester and now lives in London with two smelly cats, three smelly children and one relatively clean-smelling wife. His phenomenally popular debut Charlie Changes into a Chicken was the second bestselling middle grade debut of 2019 and has been sold in 26 languages, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, longlisted for the Blue Peter and Branford Boase Awards, and selected for Empathy Lab’s 2020 Read for Empathy list.
Josie Dom (Animalympics)
Josie lives in the small town of Halstead in Essex with her husband Nic Phine (illustrator of the Lum books), their son and daughter, a mixed-up dog Frank and a big fluffy ginger cat called Mittens. Although Josie’s books are too young for her children now, it was their love of stories when they were little which inspired Josie to pick up her pen and create. After a lifetime in sensible office jobs, Josie is relishing the opportunity to explore her creative side. Josie is passionate about supporting causes close to her heart. Each year, Josie donates 15% of profit from book sales to charity. In 2020, due to Covid-19, Josie penned an epic poem which she used to raise funds for zoos across the UK and has now turned this into a gorgeous hardback book: Animalympics.
Dianne Hofmeyr (Storm Dragon)
Dianne Hofmeyr was born in South Africa and grew up “between the mountains and the sea” at the southernmost tip of the continent. Dianne is award-winning writer who has had two IBBY Honour Books. She is the author of Zeraffa Giraffa and The Glassmaker’s Daughter with Jane Ray. Her picture books for Otter-Barry Books are My Daddy is a Silly Monkey (illustrated by Carol Thompson), Tiger Walk (illustrated by Jesse Hodgson) and Fiddle Dee Dee (illustrated by Piet Grobler). Dianne lives in London and loves to do creative workshops with children.
Sofie Miller (Meet Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking)
Joshua Seigal (Yapping Away)
Joshua Seigal is a world-renowned performance poet and educator. In 202 he won the prestigious Laugh Out Loud Book Award. His books are published by Bloomsbury and other major publishers, and he has performed at festivals such as the Dubai Literature Festival and the Edinburgh Book Festival. He recently wrote and performed for CBBC, and his fantabulous website can be viewed at www.joshuaseigal.co.uk.
Chitra Soundar (Nikhil and Jay)
Chitra Soundar is an internationally published, award-winning author of over 50 books for children. She is also an oral storyteller. Her stories are set in India and often in Indian families, and are inspired by her own growing up in India.
Neal Zetter (When the Bell Goes)
Neal Zetter is an award-winning comedy performance poet, children’s author, and entertainer with a 25-year background in communication management and mentoring. He uses his interactive rhythmic, rhyming poetry to to develop literacy, confidence, creativity and communications skills in 3-103 yr olds, making words and language accessible for the least engaged whilst streeeeeeetching the most able.
Local Authors Party
See names here
Event chairs
Kate Bevan
Diane Chandler
Jo Coburn
Torin Douglas
Lisa Evans
Amelia Fairney
Caroline Frost
Jane Garvey
Georgina Godwin
Julia Langdon
Hugh Pym
Caroline Raphael
Cathy Rentzenbrink
David Shreeve
Lea Sellers
Joan Smith
Jane Thynne
Julia Wheeler
Julian Worricker
Workshops
Laura Edralin
Peter Hanington
Phoebe Morgan
Amita Murray
Caroline Raphael
Cathy Rentzenbrink
Elise Valmorbida
Walks
Ealing and West London Tour Guides