Chantal Lyons is the author of Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain’s Wild Boar which was published to wide acclaim in 2024.
Groundbreakers won the BES Marsh Ecology Book of the Year 2024 and was also shortlisted and highly commended for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation.
Chantal is a writer and science communicator. After a number of years spent working and volunteering for social and environmental action charities, Chantal is now at Mindfully Wired Communications, a non-profit agency working to champion sustainable fishing and marine conservation.
Chantal has written for publications including BBC Wildlife and Inkcap Journal.
She is currently working on a new book, Once There Were Giants: The Past, Present and Future of Megafauna, due for publication in spring 2027.
Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005-06, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She has published 8 books of poetry in Welsh and English, the most recent of these is Sparrow Tree. Her collection, Chaotic Angels brings together the poems from her three English collections.
Gwyneth has won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and has twice been shortlisted for the Forward Prize.
In 2019 she published, with Rowan Williams, a translation of The Book of Taliesin.
In addition to her poetry, Gwyneth is a librettist and radio dramatist and has also published two works of non- fiction, Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression, shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year, and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage.
A memoir, Nightshade Mother was published to wide acclaim in September 2024. Nightshade Mother was selected as one of The Guardian’s ‘Best Biographies & Memoirs of 2024’ and was nominated for the 2025 Sky Arts Literature Award. It also won the Wales Book of the Year 2025 Creative Non-Fiction Award.
A new collection of poems, First Rain in Paradise was published in March 2025.
Jill Hopper’s debut memoir, The Mahogany Pod was published in 2021 to wide acclaim.
As a member of the writers’ collective 26 Characters, Jill has written about astrophysics for the Bloomsbury Festival, about skylarks for the Wildlife Trusts, and about two brothers killed at the Somme, for the Imperial War Museum. She is also the founder of Imaginary Friends, an informal group for women writers.
Julian Hoffman is the author of three acclaimed works of non-fiction, Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save our Wild Places, a Highly Commended Finalist for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation and a Royal Geographical Society ‘Book of the Year’ in 2020; and The Small Heart of Things, Winner of both the 2012 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature.
His most recent book, Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece was published in May 2025. Lifelines was shortlisted for the 2026 Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award and also longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2026.
Julian has written for publications including, Emergence Magazine, The Clearing, Lush Times, EarthLines, Kyoto Journal and The Redwood Coast Review.
Sarah Gibson’s debut work of non-fiction, Swifts and Us: The Life of the Bird that Sleeps in the Sky, a book about swifts and their relationship with people, was published in 2020 to wide acclaim.
Sarah lives in Shropshire and has worked for Shropshire Wildlife Trust for twenty years.
Roy Dennis is the author of several works of non-fiction including, Restoring the Wild: Rewilding our Skies, Woods and Waterways; Cottongrass Summer (longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2020); Mistletoe Winter; The Highland Cow and the Horse of the Woods and A Life of Ospreys.
Roy is a field ornithologist and wildlife consultant. He has worked in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland since 1959, most notably on the conservation of rare birds, ecological restoration and the reintroduction of lost species, such as osprey, white-tailed eagle and red kite.
Roy was awarded a MBE for services to nature conservation in Scotland in 1992 and in 2004 was voted the RSPB Golden Eagle Award winner for the person who had done most for nature conservation in Scotland in the last 100 years. In 2024, Roy was awarded an OBE for his contribution to wildlife.
David Dabydeen is the author of several novels, collections of poetry and works of non-fiction.
His debut collection of poetry, Slave Song won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Cambridge Quiller-Couch Prize. His seven novels include, The Intended (winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Disappearance; The Counting House (shortlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award); A Harlot’s Progress (shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize); Our Lady of Demerara (winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature); Molly and the Muslim Stick; and Johnson’s Dictionary. He has also co-edited The Oxford Companion to Black British History.
A new novel, Sweet Li Jie was published in 2024.
There are four scholarly monographs on David’s work, and in 2011 he was the co-subject of MUP’s Contemporary World Writers Series (Abigail Ward’s Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery).
David was Guyana’s Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010 and Guyana’s Ambassador to China from 2010 to 2015. He also worked at the University of Warwick from 1984 to 2017 as Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies and Professor of Postcolonial Literature.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge and is the recipient of the 2004 Raja Rao Award for Literature, the 2007 Hind Ratten Award, and the 2008 Anthony Sabga Prize for Literature.
Alastair Bonnett is Professor of Social Geography at Newcastle University.
He is the author of several books including, Off the Map: Forgotten Islands, Abandoned Spaces, Feral Places, Invisible Cities and What They Tell Us About the World (published in the US under the title Unruly Places) which has been translated into 12 languages; Beyond the Map: Unruly Enclaves, Ghostly Places, Emerging Lands and our Search for New Utopias; New Views; What is Geography?; How to Argue; The Age of Islands: In Search of New and Disappearing Islands (published in the US as Elsewhere: A Journey into our Age of Islands); and, most recently, Extraordinary Islands: An Atlas of Unlikely Places.
Alastair’s latest book, New Ruins: The Story of the World in 21 Abandoned and Collapsing Places will be published in October 2026.
Christine Berry is an author and researcher based in Manchester who has been described as ‘one of the central figures’ in the new left economics. She writes regularly for publications including the Guardian, New Statesman and openDemocracy, and her work has also been profiled in the Economist, Evening Standard and Financial Times.
She is also a Trustee of the charity Rethinking Economics and a contributing editor of the journal Renewal.
Christine is co-author with Joe Guinan of People Get Ready!, which was named as one of the Guardian’s top politics books of 2019.
Her forthcoming book, Owned: How Our Lives Became Assets will be published in 2026.
Caspar Henderson is the author of three acclaimed works of non-fiction, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary; A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels; and, most recently, A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in Science & Technology, 2023.
The Book of Barely Imagined Beings won The Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award and a Roger Deakin Award and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013.
Caspar writes for publications including the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Spectator, Granta and Nature.
