Epistolary
Ephemeristic
Episodic

Born Anita Hurwitz in London in 1925, Anita Rose was the elder daughter of William and Renee Lilian Hurwitz; her sister Helen was born four years later. She entered London’s South Hampstead High School for Girls at the age of seven and a half and later remembered herself as an academically able, if sometimes untidy and forgetful, pupil. She particularly enjoyed English literature, composition and poetry, found languages easy and excelled at Latin.

Annie Elliot has a BA (Hons) in Literary Studies and an MA in Creative Writing. She has worked in local government and as a newspaper reporter, and taught communication. She has written a booklet to help teachers understand the difficulties faced by dyslexic children. Her short stories and flash fiction have won acclaim in literary competitions and she has been longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Award. She writes and performs monologues. ​At university, her tutor, the late Fay Weldon, described Annie Elliot as a natural writer and her work as ‘completely brilliant’.

A former factory worker, a dealer in modern first editions, a landscape gardener and a part-time university lecturer (among other occupations), Chris Hilton has visited Cuba over thirty times and has lived there twice. The events described in The Attraction of Cuba took place in the early 2000s, during the final years of Fidel Castro and the coming of the internet, and proved to be life-changing for those involved: the author, his friends and his enemies. 

Dan Jones is the Head of European Space Agency (ESA) Policy at the U.K. Space Agency, where he represents the UK’s official position on space matters in front of other European nations and the ESA itself. 

The author is a journalist working mainly in the broadcast media but also for magazines and newspapers (The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Statesman). He spent two decades with British commercial television, reporting, producing and making documentaries, before moving to the US, where he worked for ABC, CBS, CNN, Discovery, A&E and The History Channel. His earliest work included coverage of violence in Northern Ireland, and then extended into international issues, especially in the Third World. Since 2012 he has been a producer and correspondent for PBS, concentrating on ethical issues. He broadcasts a weekly public-radio dispatch of media criticism, The Media Beat, and writes an online column with the same name, at www.themediabeat.us. A graduate of Oxford University, he has been a US citizen since 2002 and lives in New York City and Ireland. He has been honoured by Britain’s Royal Television Society with its Social Documentary Award, and by the British Association for the Advancement of Science with its Television Award. 

F.X. Contreras was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico. He left the country in his twenties to attend university in the USA, obtaining an M.A. in Latin American Literature and a Ph.D. in Humanities, since when he has lived in Toronto, Boulder, Las Cruces, Dallas, Princeton and Boston. ​He has an interest in creative writing and absurdist theater, and his own work includes plays, short stories and interactive fiction exploring themes of power, corruption and human folly. He currently lives in Valencia, Spain

A Zimbabwean writer of Indian-Gujarati heritage, Fatima Kara is best known for her debut novel The Train House on Lobengula Street, published by Envelope Books in 2023. She was born and raised in Bulawayo, in the Indian community there, and now lives in the United States while maintaining close connections with Zimbabwe. She has an MFA from Spalding University in Kentucky. Her book was shortlisted for the UK’s Laxfield Literary Launch Prize and subsequently won the Outstanding First Creative Published Work at Zimbabwe’s 2024 National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA).When not writing, she propagates fruit and nut trees, and plants them in schools and rural communities around Zimbabwe. 

An artist whose life was repeatedly overtaken by history, George Tomaziu was born in Romania in 1915. He came of age in the cosmopolitan world of interwar Europe, studying art in Bucharest and Paris and moving among the literary and artistic circles of the time. His godfather was the composer George Enescu. In 1938 he worked in the Paris studio of André Lhote. He was an unconventional young man: restless, cultivated and bisexual, with an instinct for the bohemian life. 

Ian Ross spent forty years working in business overseas, where the need to understand other cultures and politics became indispensable to his role. Educated at Cambridge University and later at the Henley Business School, he has an MA in Economics and an MSc in Coaching and Behavioural Change. He and his wife have three children, now adults, and four grandchildren. He still loves travelling, and currently volunteers to drive convoys of emergency supplies to Ukraine.

Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Jane Reid (née Harwood) read English, going up in 1951 and taking her degree in 1954, the same year she was runner-up in the Vogue Talent Competition. She later took a further degree, with distinction, from the University of Cape Town in 1982.

Born in Poland in 1930, the author was a Holocaust survivor, British writer and translator. She escaped the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and eventually emigrated alone to Australia in 1948 before moving to London in 1958. Her autobiographical A Square of Sky became a German bestseller, school text, play and film. She later worked extensively as an author and translator of books for younger readers and radio plays, including work for the BBC. She died in London on 22 October 2023, aged 93. 

Born in India and educated in Southern Africa and Cambridge, Jonathan Lawley joined the British Colonial Service in Northern Rhodesia, became fluent in the Tonga language of the Zambezi Valley and was the last British District Commissioner in independent Zambia. Fluency in French took him to the Congo, Morocco and Mauritius.

His interest in management development led him to set up and run a Rio Tinto-funded programme to develop the first indigenous technical managers for the mining industry in Southern Africa, a field of expertise in which he went on to take a PhD.

After retirement he became Africa Director of British Executive Service Overseas (BESO), was the first Director of the Royal African Society and went on to become adviser to the Business Council for Africa. He remains active in African affairs.

Previous publications

Transcending culture: Developing Africa’s technical managers

Beyond the Malachite Hills Zambia since 1960 

King Rainier is the comic embodiment of fairytale sentimentality. He is also the father of an eponymous heroine, a fact that appals him less than his not knowing what eponymous means.

Kirby Porter grew up in Belfast near the Harland and Wolff shipyard where one of his grandfathers and one of his great-grandfathers helped build the Titanic between 1909-12. He studied Russian at Queen’s University Belfast and took further degrees at the University of London and the University of Wales. He became Head of Library Services for a North London borough, gave talks on Russian and Irish Poetry, and was an active trade unionist. Back in Belfast, he created library services for the Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as teaching courses in Information Management at the University of Ulster. He now lives on the east coast of Scotland.

Born in England,. K.J. Kelly has worked in advertising in London, Melbourne, Sydney and Los Angeles. Each location has funded a wealth of short stories but it was the childhood tales of the writer’s father in West Cork, Ireland that inspired the mere observer to become a historical novelist. He currently lives and works in West London and continues to travel widely.

The Revd Dr Linda Mary Lubbe is an Anglican priest, theologian and writer whose ministry has taken her from South Africa to rural Norfolk. Her interest in the relationship between Christianity and African culture long predates the experiences described in her memoir, Sand in My Shoes.

Musician, music teacher and amateur composer, Luke Ottevanger was born in West London in 1975, lived in Twickenham until the age of seven, then moved with his family to rural Leicestershire. He spent much of his childhood playing the piano and immersing himself in its repertoire, an exploration that continues to this day. Around that time he also began to experiment with composition of his own. 

Born 3 April 1950 in Johannesburg, Marguerite Poland is an award-winning South African writer of books for adults and children. Brought up in the Eastern Cape, she studied Social Anthropology and Xhosa, took a master’s in Zulu literature and folktales, and was awarded a doctorate for her study of the cattle of the Zulu people. Two of her books—The Mantis and the Moon and Woodash Stars—won South Africa’s Percy FitzPatrick Award. The Train to Doringbult was shortlisted for the CNA Awards; Shades has been a matriculation set text for over a decade; and The Keeper received the Nielsen Booksellers’ Choice Award in 2015 as the title South African booksellers most enjoyed reading, selling and promoting the previous year. In 2016 she won South Africa’s highest civic award for her contribution to the field of indigenous languages, literature and anthropology. 

Michael Goldfarb is an award-winning author, documentarian and podcaster. A native New Yorker, he moved to London in 1985 and spent many years covering conflicts and attempts at conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Iraq for NPR (National Public Radio) in the USA. Since 1993, the BBC has sent him back to America periodically to report on social and cultural changes in his homeland subsequent to his relocation. More recently he has been charting the rise, fall and persistence of Donald Trump in a series of radio documentaries for the BBC; on his FRDH (First Rough Draft of History) podcast (goldfarbpod.com); and at his substack, History of a Calamity (michaelgoldfarb.substack.com). His journalism has won the highest honours on both sides of the Atlantic including the DuPont-Columbia Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Lowell Thomas Award in America and the Sony Gold award in Britain. He has also been a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.” His life as a reporter has led to his writing books. Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq (the forerunner to The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat) followed his experiences as an unembedded reporter in Kurdistan during the first phase of Gulf War II, between March and April 2003. It was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005. 

Michael Holman was brought up in small-town white Rhodesia, establishing his political credentials in Salisbury (now Harare) as a University of Rhodesia student leader opposing UDI in 1965. In August 1967 he was served with a government order confining him to his hometown (Gwelo, now Gweru). Allowed to leave after a year, he completed an MSc at the University of Edinburgh, before returning to Zimbabwe to work as a journalist. He narrowly escaped arrest after refusing to accept a military call-up and after three weeks in hiding, left the country illegally. He soon returned to Africa, basing himself in Lusaka, Zambia, and writing as the Financial Times’s Africa correspondent. After moving to London he became the paper’s Africa Editor, taking early retirement in 2002 following surgery for Parkinson’s disease, but continues to visit his old beat regularly. In addition to collections of his reports, he has written three satirical novels set in the imaginary East African nation of Kuwisha. 

Michael Kretzmer was born and brought up in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Hemoved to England in 1976 and became a journalist and film-maker, eventually writing for theLondon Sunday Times and producing television documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 andoverseas broadcasters, including J’Accuse!, a film about Holocaust denial in Lithuania. 

​His career has included many digressions, including building a small media company, busking across Europe and creating a tiny farm producing vegetables, fruit and smug chickens. The Very Annoying Jew is his first novel. Michael is a husband, father and grandfather and enjoys motorbikes, reading, Torah study, gardening and travel.

Michael Ladner was born in Princeton, N.J., where his Viennese father was a medieval historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, alongside fellow academics Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. Having been patted on the head approvingly by the latter, Michael went on to take a B.A. from Harvard, an M.A. from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Claremont Graduate University, with further studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and School of Visual Arts. 

​He has taught American and European History, Art History, Psychology and English, and has lived mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In 2006, he and his wife moved to California. In this, his third novel, he draws on his father’s and grandfather’s forced exile from Austria, following the Nazi Anschluss.

Nigel Thorpe (born 1945) grew up in South London before moving, aged eleven, to East Grinstead, where he attended the grammar school. After gaining a first-class honours degree in History from University College, Cardiff, he joined HM Diplomatic Service. As well as positions in London, especially as head of Central European Department (1992–96), he served in Poland (twice), Bangladesh, Canada and Zimbabwe, finishing his career as ambassador to Hungary (1998–2003). He then worked for Vodafone before immersing himself in voluntary work in London. He has been married twice and is close to his children from both marriages.

Cullen is a retired civil engineer living in Oxford and belongs to a small writers’ group. His childhood included time in Egypt, while his professional career took him to around forty countries. He also collects military medals, an interest that led him to write In Which They Served and subsequently Flights of Fancy. 

Robert Dudley Best (1892–1984) was an industrial designer best known for the Bestlite, an iconic British modernist design of the 1930s. Born into a prosperous Birmingham family, he studied at an art school in Düsseldorf before the First World War. He later wrote about his father’s business innovations, the history of early twentieth-century design and his own experiences, including recollections of F.M. Alexander. 

Born in Washington, D.C., Robert Mullen grew up in Virginia. After studying at George Washington University, he did graduate work at the University of Alberta and became a lecturer at McGill University. His published works include a volume of short stories, Americas, which was shortlisted for a Commonwealth First Book award, and Call of the Camino: Myths, Legends and Pilgrim Stories on the Way to Santiago de Compostela. He lives in Edinburgh. 

Roger Allen has been a photographer for 50 years, winning the British Photographer of the Year award twice, as well as News Photographer of the Year and Arts and Entertainment Photographer of the Year. He began his career in a dark room at the national news agency in Guildford, Surrey before taking up photography full time. He went on to join Today newspaper, the first colour paper in the UK. 

​After being invited to join the Daily Mirror, he spent 25 years travelling the world, covering major events including war and armed conflicts during the 1980s and 1990s and the Romanian Uprising of 1989. He was also sent on three tours of duty in Afghanistan. He followed his time at the Mirror by becoming involved in animal welfare, helping to save animals from distressing and cruel situations by bringing their plights to public attention in the print media. 

​He is married with three daughters and two granddaughters.

Rupert de Borchgrave trained first as a scientist, studying Psychology at Oxford and completing a DPhil in Neuroscience, before moving progressively into economics and finance. He began his professional career with McKinsey & Co, where he spent two years, followed by five years with Sophron Partners, a London consultancy specialising in such areas as strategic sales, customer analysis and marketing data. In 2002 he also co-authored a Chatham House report, sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for International Development, on technology and sustainable development in preparation for that year’s World Summit in Johannesburg.

Sanjay Panikkar grew up in Kochi (then Cochin), where a love of books led him to spend countless hours in the city’s public library. During his school and college years, he wrote short stories and essays—some prize-winning, others published in school magazines. His enthusiasm for storytelling stayed with him into adulthood, alongside his career as a software architect. In 2023, he was selected for a writers’ workshop conducted by author Anita Nair, and was inspired to write this novel. He lives in Bangalore with his wife, Lekshmi, and their son, Aditya.

The publisher and editor of EnvelopeBooks and Booklaunch, Stephen Games is the author of fifteen nonfiction titles. He began his career as an architectural critic, working for the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, freelancing for the Guardian as a correspondent, and being contracted to BBC Radio 3 as a documentary maker. After joining the start-up team of The Independent in 1986 and standing for Parliament as Green in 1992, he moved briefly to California where he became an opinion writer for the Los Angeles Times. Returning to the UK he published four books about Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and anpther four about Sir John Betjeman, and then became increasingly involved in books on other topics. He studied Graphic Design at the Central School of Art in London before taking an undergraduate degree in Architecture at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has taught at universities in Britain and America, and holds a PhD from Cambridge. 

Steven Jay Griffel has been a novelist for the last twenty years, after thirty years in corporate publish­ing, initially with McGraw-Hill and then as a writer and freelance editor. He studied at Queens College, CUNY, where he registered as a Creative Writing major, going on to gain an MA in American Literature from Fordham University. 

His first novel, Forty Years Later, became an Amazon Number One bestseller and was followed by four other titles centred around the character of David Grossman, a middle-aged publishing exec­utive. Secrets of the Four-Chambered Heart is his seventh novel. 

He lives in New York City, where he was born and raised, is married and has daughters and grandsons.

Born in 1990, Ososanya is a Nigerian broadcast journalist and graduate of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism. He works at the BBC’s West Africa bureau in Lagos, specialising in Pidgin English reporting. His previous roles include television presenter at the Nigerian Television Authority and Senior Editor at Legit.ng. He is also a fellow of the African Academy for Open Source Investigations. His first book, Later Tonight, appeared in 2016. 

A former Financial Times foreign correspondent, William Keeling’s reporting exposed a multibillion-dollar corruption scandal in Nigeria and led to his deportation. He later left journalism and became co-owner of the historic chocolate company Prestat. He now lives and writes in Somerset.