Philippe Auclair
Philippe Auclair is the England football correspondent for Eurosport.fr and Swiss national radio RTS, and a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Guardian Football Weekly podcast, for which he specialises in governance issues and the geopolitical dimension of football.
Nick Caistor
Nick Caistor is a British writer and translator, and was for many years a senior producer at the BBC World Service. He has published biographies of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Fidel Castro, as well as guides to Buenos Aires and Mexico City. He has translated works by authors including Isabel Allende, Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Marsé, Philippe Claudel, Paul Fournel, and five novels by Olivier Norek.
Sorj Chalandon
Sorj Chalandon was a reporter for Libération from 1974 to 2008, during which time he was awarded the Albert Londres prize for his writing on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and his reporting on the trial of Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie. He went on to work for Le Canard Enchaîné. He is the author of a dozen novels, all originally published in French by Éditions Grasset. His numerous literary awards include Le Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française, and le Prix Médicis. His 2013 novel Le Quatrième Mur won the prestigious Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, and the Goncourt de l'Orient, among other accolades, and has been adapted for stage and screen, and translated into 10 languages. The novel was translated into English by Cheney Crow in 2026 as The Fourth Wall, and published by Lilliput Press.
- Picture: JF PAGA
Valentin Deudon
Valentin Deudon is a French poet and a football fanatic. As a child in France, he became fascinated by Éric Cantona and Manchester United. Today, he writes full-time and plays for the N.D.C. Angers veterans’ football team as well as the French national football team for writers.
- Picture: Franck Potvin
Ben Faccini
Ben Faccini was born in England and brought up in rural France and Italy. He worked for many years for the UNESCO in Paris. He is the author The Water-Breather (Flamingo 2002), The Incomplete Husband (Portobello 2007), and more recently Other People's Children (Granta, 2026). As well as novels, he has written extensively on issues in the developing world, particularly about streets and working children and innovations in education. Apart from his writing skills, Ben Faccini is a translator. He has translated into English novels such as Lydie Salvayre’s Pas pleurer (as Cry, Mother Spain), Mahi Binebine’s Le Fou du Roi (as The King’s Fool), and Clara Dupont-Monod’s S’Adapter (as And the Stones Cry Out).
Joseph Incardona
Swiss author Joseph Incardona has written more than fifteen novels across a range of genres. He is also a screenwriter for comics, film, and television, as well as a playwright and director. His work is both popular and critically acclaimed; it has won numerous awards and has been adapted for film. Incardona’s work has been translated into German, Italian, Korean, and Georgian, but this is his first book to be available in English.
- Picture: Chloé Cohen
Fergal Keane
Fergal Keane is one of the BBC’s best-known correspondents and has won numerous awards for his reports from the world’s trouble spots. He has been the BBC’s correspondent in Africa, Asia and Northern Ireland as well as a peripatetic reporter following conflict around the globe. He has won a BAFTA, EMMY and the George Orwell Prize for political literature for his eyewitness account of the Rwandan genocide. He has written numerous bestselling books combining historical perspectives with deeply personal remembrances. He is an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. Keane is married to his filmmaking partner, the Oscar winning French director Alice Doyard. They live between London and Paris.
Sophie R. Lewis
Sophie R. Lewis is a renowned translator and editor. Working from French and Portuguese, she has translated works by Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Leïla Slimani, Noémi Lefebvre, Emmanuelle Pagano, Mona Chollet, Françoise Sagan and Annie Ernaux, among others. Lewis’s translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
- Picture: Anna Michell
Nastassja Martin
Nastassja Martin, author and anthropologist specialising in Arctic populations, has studied the Gwich'in people of Alaska and the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. She has written Croire aux fauves (Verticales, 2019), published in English by New York Review Books as In the Eye of the Wild, and Les Âmes sauvages: Face à l'Occident, la résistance d'un peuple d'Alaska (La Découverte, 2016), winner of the Prix Louis Castex of the Académie française. In 2023, she became Professor of Habitability of the Earth and Just Transitions at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and she is the director of Tvaian, a documentary based on the experiences of Daria, one of the subjects of East of Dreams.
- Picture: Mathieu Génon
Abir Mukherjee
Abir Mukherjee is the Times bestselling author of the Wyndham & Banerjee series of crime novels set in Raj-era India which have sold over half a million copies worldwide and been translated into 16 languages. His books have won numerous awards including the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year, the British Book Awards Crime & Thriller Novel of the Year, the CWA Dagger for best Historical Novel, the Prix du Polar Européen, the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing and the Amazon Publishing Readers Award for E-book for the Year.
Alongside fellow author, Vaseem Khan, he also hosts the popular Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast, where every fortnight, joined by special guests from the media and literature, he takes a wry look at the world of books, writing, and the creative arts, tackling everything from bestsellers to pop culture.
- Picture: Stuart Simpson
Olivier Norek
Olivier Norek is a bestselling French novelist and screenwriter whose acclaimed thrillers have sold over 3 million copies and been translated into numerous languages. After working in humanitarian aid during the war in the former Yugoslavia, he spent 18 years in the French police, rising to the rank of capitaine in the Seine-Saint-Denis criminal investigation unit.
Drawing on this experience, he is the author of the highly praised Banlieues trilogy (The Lost and the Damned, Turf Wars, Breaking Point), the powerful social novel Between Two Worlds, and the gripping thriller Surface. His latest novel, The Winter Warriors (Open Borders Press, 2025), marks a shift to historical fiction. It has been hailed as a “masterpiece” by Le Figaro and winner of the 2024 Prix Renaudot des Lycéens.
- Picture: Pauline Darley
Fiona O'Brien
Fiona O'Brien is a London-based journalist, writer and press freedom advocate. Currently Director for Europe and Central Asia at the Committee to Protect Journalists, she started her career as a correspondent in Africa and the Middle East, reporting for Reuters on politics and wars including Iraq, Sudan and the DRC. She has worked for the United Nations, and spent many years teaching journalism at Kingston University. Also a writer of fiction, she was one of the London Library's Emerging Writers in 2024/25.
Camille de Peretti
Camille de Peretti published Thornytorinx in 2005, which received the First Novel Prize at the Chambéry Festival. Her ninth novel, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, has been showered with literary prizes, including the Prix des Romancières, the Prix du roman Marie Claire, the Prix Maison de la Presse, and has been translated into some twenty countries. For the past fifteen years, Camille de Peretti has led writing workshops and given lectures around the world, sharing her passion for art and literature.