A Love Letter to Europe

Frank Cottrell Boyce is the author of Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth, The Astounding Broccoli Boy, Cosmic, Framed, and Millions, the last of which was a New York Times bestseller and was made into a movie by Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle. His books have won or been nominated for numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and the Whitbread Children's Book Award. Frank is also a screenwriter, having penned the scripts for a number of feature films as well as the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. He lives in Liverpool with his family.

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prizewinning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the DuffCooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King and his recent bestseller Anarchy.

MARGARET DRABBLE is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

Simon Callow has appeared widely on stage, television and in films, including the highly successful Four Weddings and a Funeral. He has directed drama, musicals and comedy, and has written several books on actors and acting.

Tracey Emin was born in 1963 to an English mother and Turkish father, and grew up in Margate. She left school at 15, but later studied Fine Art at Maidstone and went on to the Royal College of Art. She is now an internationally renowned artist whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the world. Although known as a visual artist, Tracey Emin's confessional writings have always formed the backbone to her work and in 2005 she published her memoir, Strangeland, drawing together new and revised work from the previous 25 years.
In 2007, she was elected as a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, where she is now a Professor of Drawing and in 2013 she was appointed CBE.

J.K. Rowling is best-known as the author of the seven Harry Potter novels, which were made into eight blockbuster films. She is also the author of Casual Vacancy, a standalone novel for adults and, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, writes the Cormoran Strike crime novels.

Holly Johnson is an English artist, musician, and writer, best known as the lead vocalist of Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Pete Townshend is the legendary lead guitarist and principal songwriter for The Who, one of the most influential rock-and-roll bands of all time. He's also the author of The Age of Anxiety as well as one of Rolling Stone's ""100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time"". He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 and resides in West London, where he was raised.

Melvyn Bragg was born in Wigton, Cumbria, in 1939. He went to the local Grammar School and then to Wadham College, Oxford. He joined the BBC in 1961, and published his first novel, For Want of a Nail, in 1965.
He left the BBC and continued to write novels which include The Soldier's Return (WH Smith Literary Award), Without a City Wall (Mail on Sunday John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and Now Is the Time (Parliamentary Book Award 2016). A Place in England, Son of War and Crossing the Lines were all nominated for the Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes The Adventure of English and The Book of Books, and his first memoir, Back in the Day, was published in 2022 to critical acclaim.
He edited and presented The South Bank Show from 1977 and hosted the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time from 1998. He has now retired from both. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society and of The British Academy. He was given a Peerage in 1998 and a Companion of Honour in 2017.

Will Hutton is Principal of Hertford College Oxford and a columnist for the Observer. His bestselling books include The State We're In, The World We're In, Them and Us and, with Andrew Adonis, Saving Britain.

Chris Riddell is an acclaimed British artist who lives in Brighton, England. He has written and illustrated many books of his own, including Ottoline and the Yellow Cat and Ottoline Goes to School, and has illustrated, for Bloomsbury UK, The Graveyard Book; Coraline; and Fortunately, the Milk; as well as The Sleeper and the Spindle.

Philip Ardagh is the Roald Dahl Funny Prize-winning author of over 100 children's titles.

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the classics editor of the TLS. Her books include the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii, The Parthenon, Confronting the Classics and SPQR.

Brian Catling was born in London in 1948. He is a former Professor of Fine Art at the Ruskin School, Oxford, and is an acclaimed performance artist and sculptor. His Vorrh trilogy is followed this year by Earwig, which is being filmed by Lucile Hadžihalilovic.

Shami Chakrabarti is Britain's leading human rights campaigner. She is the author of On Liberty, an impassioned defence of human rights, published in 2014, and Of Women, a feminist argument for affirmative action in 2017.

Chris Cleave is a New York Times #1 bestselling novelist whose books are published in forty countries. His debut novel INCENDIARY won the Somerset Maugham Award, among others. His second, the Costa-shortlisted THE OTHER HAND, was a global bestseller and sat in the New York Times Top Ten for over a year (under the US title, Little Bee). Both books were shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. He lives in Kingston-upon-Thames with his wife and three children, and welcomes readers at facebook.com/ChrisCleaveBooks, www.chriscleave.com and twitter.com/chriscleave.

Peter J Conradi is the author of the widely acclaimed biography Iris Murdoch: A Life.

Historical novelist Lindsey Davis is best known for her novels set in Ancient Rome, including the much-loved Marcus Didius Falco series, although she has also written about the English Civil War, including A Cruel Fate, a book for the Quick Reads literacy initiative. Her examination of the paranoid reign of the roman emperor Domitian began with Master and God, a standalone novel set in that dark period, leading to her new series about Flavia Albia.

Her books are translated and five radio dramas are regularly rebroadcast on BBC Radio 4X. Her many awards include the Premio Colosseo (from the city of Rome) and the Crime Writers' Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. Most recently she was awarded the Ivanhoe Prize for lifetime achievement in historical fiction, given by the Spanish City of Ubeda.

She has been the Chair of the UK Crimewriters' Association, Honorary President of the UK Classical Association, President of the Birmingham and Midlands Institute and is a Fellow of the UK Society of Authors.

www.lindseydavis.co.uk

Lindsey Davis - The Crime Writers' Association (thecwa.co.uk)