The Editors
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
Simon Underdown
Simon is Senior Lecturer in Biological Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. He read Archæology at Leicester before undertaking doctoral research on Neanderthal extinction at Cambridge.
Simon teaches, researches and writes on human evolution, forensic anthropology, palæoepidemeology, the relationship between biology and culture and the development of evolutionary thought. He is
particularly interested in science education and communication, and has appeared on a range of radio and television programmes discussing aspects of human evolution and the latest finds and developments in the subject. He has also contributed book reviews to numerous publications, including History Today and the THES and has written for the Guardian on a number of contemporary issues in science, including climate change, creationism, religious belief and the use of human remains in research. Simon is currently working on a book that addresses the relationship between the social and biological aspects of being human from an anthropological perspective.
Simon’s book Anthropology, A Beginner’s Guide, co-written with Joy Hendry, was published by Oneworld in 2012.
Click to read Simon’s articles in The Guardian
Clive Dickinson
Clive Dickinson read English at Oxford and has more than 30 years writing experience as a 
full-time author, editor and project manager. As a ghostwriter he has produced a wide range of books from an Enid Blyton novel and best-seller celebrity titles, to his most recent work, a ghosted novel based on true-life experiences in American organised crime 50 years ago. His work as a children’s writer has included historical fiction (for Collins), light reference (for Red Fox, André Deutsch and Puffin), books with Manchester United Football Club and a fun look at maths that is still in use in schools around the world over 25 years after it was first published. His historical works have included work on royal biographies, books for the National Trust, English Heritage, the Historical Houses Association, Visit Britain and Past Times. For several years he has devised, written and produced popular reference titles for Marks & Spencer. European editions of Clive’s books have been translated into several languages, notably German and Spanish, which sell internationally from the USA to Australia.
Rita Carter
Rita Carter is an award-winning science and medical writer who specialises in books about the
human mind and brain. Mapping the Mind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998) was the first layman’s guide to the emerging field of neuroscience. It received exceptional praise from academic and literary critics and was short-listed for the 1999 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book prize (now Aventis). It has sold more than 100,000 copies and has been translated into 14 languages.
Exploring Consciousness (University of California Press, 2002) integrated the science and philosophy of this famously “hard problem” in a way that made it accessible to the ordinary reader. It also received very strong reviews and was a bestseller for its publisher.
Use Your Brain – Memory (Cassell’s, 2006) is part of a series (edited by Rita) which shows how brain science can be applied to the psychology of everyday life.
Her latest book, Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality was published to critical acclaim in January 2008 by Little Brown.
Rita also contributes to newspapers and magazines, including New Scientist, The Independent, The Times and The Daily Mail. She was twice awarded the Medical Journalists’ Association prize for outstanding contribution to medical journalism.
Rita worked for several years as a radio and TV presenter. She continues to appear regularly on TV and radio and gives frequent talks and lectures throughout Europe and the United States.
Dennis Hamley
Dennis read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Leicester University. He has been a children’s and young adults author since his first novel, Pageants of Despair, was published by Andre Deutsch in 1974. This has since been reissued in 2006 by Paul Dry Books of Philadelphia. His many other works include the novellas Hare’s Choice (1988, published by Andre Deutsch in the UK and Dell in the USA, reissued in 2006 by Barn Owl Books); The War and Freddy (Andre Deutsch 1991, shortlisted for the Smarties Prize and reissued in 2007 by Catnip Books); the first two novels of a trilogy Ellen’s People (Walker Books 2006, published in the USA by Candlewick Press retitled Without Warning) and Divided Loyalties (Walker Books 2008).
Dennis has written crime fiction for young adults in the Point Crime series published by Scholastic,
including the medieval mystery sequence The Joslin de Lay Mysteries (1998-2001). He has published two collections of his own short stories, contributed to many other collections and edited two short story collections for Oxford University Press. Dennis was a teacher, teacher trainer and County English Adviser for Hertfordshire, where he founded two long-running residential writing courses, for teachers and primary school pupils. He is tutor for short fiction for the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education Diploma in Creative Writing. His website is www.dennishamley.com
Fiona Thornton
Fiona Thornton has over twenty years’ publishing experience as a production editor, copy-editor and editorial 
consultant. She did a BEd at Cambridge, and after two years teaching English made the career move into publishing, cutting her editorial teeth as an English Editor with Longman’s in Hong Kong; she also co-authored English language text books for them. On her return to the UK she worked for several years for Alan Sutton Publishing, gaining experience as a production editor and subsequently as a Senior Editor.
Since opting for the flexibility of freelancing, she has undertaken work for many publishing houses, and has also copy-edited a number of titles for The National Trust, Past Times, English Heritage, Marks & Spencer and the British Library, amongst others. She works regularly for Manchester University Press, primarily on titles from their history and politics lists. Fiona has tackled everything from calendars and crosswords, through children’s fiction, company histories and sports books, to multi-authored academic texts. Her nickname in the trade is ‘Mrs Picky’ – a sobriquet of which, as a professional pedant, she is especially proud!
Ben Dupré
Ben Dupré is a bestselling author and editor of over 20 years’ experience. A Classics scholar at Oxford University, he worked for Guinness Publishing and Oxford University Press between 1986 and 2004, publishing a wide range of non-fiction and reference titles for both adults and children.
Since 2004 he has been a writer and a freelance editor and publishing consultant. Ben’s first book, 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know (Quercus), was published in the US in 2007 and in the following year was the UK’s bestselling philosophy book. Translation rights in the book have so far been sold in thirteen countries. His latest books are Where History Was Made: Landmarks of World History; and 50 Big Ideas You Really Need to Know, which takes some of history’s most important and challenging ideas and makes them accessible to a general audience.
Trevor Mostyn
Trevor Mostyn has been a journalist, publisher and consultant in the
Arab world, Iran and India. In 1965 he hitch-hiked to India, returning via Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Later he travelled constantly in the region as Macmillan Publishers’ Middle East Manager. From 1990 to 1996 he created and ran the European Union’s Med Media Programme.
He wrote for the New Statesman on the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the civil war in Lebanon and visited Sarajevo as a war correspondent with Reporters sans Frontières in 1993. He was a Financial Times correspondent in Cairo and Middle East correspondent for The Tablet. He writes for Prospect and reviews books for the Times Literary Supplement.
He also ran the Journalist Fellowship Programme at The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations. He has also 
written a romantic novel set in the Middle East. His published books are Censorship in Islamic Societies (2002), Major Political Events in Iran, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula 1945-1990 (1991), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa (1988), Egypt’s Belle Époque - Cairo 1869-1952 (1989, published in a new edition in June 2006), Coming of Age in the Middle East (1987) and the MEED Practical Guides to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan (1981-83). He is deputy chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee for whom he has visited the Chernobyl region of Belarus, covered the trial of Saad El-Din Ibrahim in Egypt and defended a Congo-Brazzaville asylum-seeker in Oxford.
Cherry Mosteshar
Cherry Mosteshar is an author and journalist. After the publication of her
book, Unveiled: Love and Death Among the Ayatollahs, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei condemned her as ‘a notorious man-hater’ for the book’s strong attack on the violation of women’s rights in Iran. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, called her a trouble maker and Tony Blair is said to have thought she needed ’sorting out’ in response to her political journalism. She has also written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, The Daily Mail and many other newspapers and magazines worldwide. She has also been a page editor on The Independent business pages and at The Guardian. Cherry also worked on the Op/Ed pages of The Guardian and The Independent. She has appeared on the BBC – including Radio 4’s The Today programme – CNN, Radio Five Live, Sky News, and numerous other local and international TV and radio stations.
The Guardian called her a ‘left-wing hero’ - before she went to work for them. Her greatest moment in her 25 years as a journalist is shaking hands with Nelson Mandela. Her greatest regret is being too ill and having to be replaced in an interview with David Bowie.
She has worked in London and as a Foreign Correspondent for the Financial Times, The Economist, The Independent and most recently at The Guardian. Now based in Oxford, Cherry has worked in Hong Kong and Iran and has written on the Middle East, Islam, UK politics, the arts and South-East Asia. She was one of a handful of female Sports journalists in the 1980s, and covered teams such as Spurs. She started her career as a television producer and has worked in television in Iran and Hong Kong.
Cherry is also a ghost writer and has written fiction for adults and children as well as screenplays and various works for the theatre. Her latest book, a crime thriller set in the Middle East, England and the US, will be published in January 2014. She is also writing a new series of books for children.
Lesley McDowell
Lesley McDowell is a literary critic and the author of a novel, The Picnic, published by Black and White, Edinburgh in 2007, and a 
non-fiction book Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and Their Famous Literary Partnerships. She trained as an academic after completing a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Glasgow in 1994, and taught for two years in the Department of English at the 
University of St Andrews, before taking up full-time literary journalism. She has reviewed for the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, the Herald and the Scotsman. In 2005 she was shortlisted for the Orange/Scotsman Short Story award and in 2008 won a Writers’ Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council for work on a forthcoming historical novel. She lives in Glasgow.
Joselyn Morton
Joselyn Morton is a journalist, casting director and producer for film, television and theatre. She has worked with the greats, including Barry Levinson, Stephen Spielberg, Kevin Costner and the late, great Robert Mitchum. Joselyn started her career as a teacher in New Zealand, Hong Kong and London. In the late 1960s she turned to journalism, first as a picture editor for IPC Magazines in London. After a period as a freelance journalist, Joselyn entered the publishing world working for Phoebus, Octopus, and was the Assistant Editor on the British Film Institute’s Annual Year Book that was brought out to celebrate their first 50 years. In the 1980s she worked as a freelance casting assistant, and in the 1990s as a casting director and producer for film, television and theatre in London and New Zealand.
Joselyn has researched, developed and produced film projects including Murray Head’s music video ‘Little Bit of Loving’ and a documentary on the Jewish community in Auckland. She then joined Ocean Productions as a producer.
Her TV, theatre and film credits include projects for NZ’s South Pacific Pictures, episodes of Soldier Soldier for ITV; NBC and CBS projects directed by Marvin Chomsky; Sink the Belgrano and Metamorphosis at the Mermaid Theatre – both written and directed by Steven Berkoff (the latter starring Steven, Linda Marlowe, Saskia Reeves and Tim Roth); The Young Sherlock Holmes with Nick Rowe, Sophie Ward and Alan Cox directed by Barry Levinson, Executive Producer Stephen Spielberg; Rapa Nui with Cliff Curtis and Rena Owen, directed by Kevin Reynolds and produced by Kevin Costner.
Dr Mavis Curtis
Mavis has spent many years working in education and with children of all ages, and has explored a wide range of books, from The very Hungry Caterpillar to His Dark Materials by way of Room on the Broom and Horrid Henry. She has also undertaken a substantial body of research into children’s oral tradition and has written and edited books and articles on the subject. She has appeared on radio and television, in her role as an expert “hopscotchologist”, and has reviewed books on children’s folklore. She has been involved with reading schemes with primary school children and a project exploring with children the structure of children’s literature. She also writes on rural history.
Dr Sarah Shaw
Sarah Shaw read Greek and English at Manchester University. She went on to do a doctorate in
English Literature. She studied Pali at Oxford and has written two books of translations of early Buddhist texts, with accompanying explanatory material: Buddhist Meditation; An Anthology of Texts (RoutledgeCurzon 2006) and The Jatakas; Birth 
Stories of the Bodhisattva (Penguin India, 2006; Penguin Classic series 2008). She has just written a book on the context of Buddhist Meditation, entitled An Introduction to Buddhist Meditation, that is coming out with RoutledgeCurzon in the summer (2008). She teaches for the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education and Randolph College, and writes on Buddhist subjects.
Kate Bevan
Kate Bevan is a writer and broadcaster with 20 years of experience. She began her career in local newspapers and spent 15 years on the Financial Times editing and writing for various sections of the paper. She went freelance in 2005 and since then has written for New Statesman, the Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph and Square Meal.
Kate appears regularly on BBC News 24 as a paper reviewer and occasionally as a pundit on Five Live, BBC Breakfast and Radio Wales.
Click to read articles by Kate Bevan
Dr Pauline Kiernan
Pauline is a screenwriter, script editor, author and award-winning playwright, as well as a Shakespeare scholar and former journalist. Her most recent book Filthy Shakespeare:
Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns (Quercus) was an Observer Book of the Year.
She has written five screenplays, including one commissioned by an independent Hollywood producer, which is now in development, and another by a young UK company. She has been a script reader for several film companies, and acts as consultant on Shakespeare productions.
She has an MA in Playwriting from the University of Birmingham, under the tutelage of the
playwrights Mark Ravenhill, April de Angeles and David Edgar, and has won the Special Prize in the Royal Exchange Playwriting Competition for her stage play, Actors! which was then performed in London.
Pauline has an MA and Doctorate in English from the University of Oxford, where she taught Shakespeare and Drama courses for several years, and was appointed the Leverhulme Research Fellow, working with directors and actors at Shakespeare’s Globe, in its first five years. Her academic books include the acclaimed Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama (CUP) and Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (Macmillan), and she has lectured widely on Shakespeare and drama in Europe and the States.
Pauline is a member of the Royal Society of Literature, The Society of Authors, and on the Committee of Writers in Oxford.
Victoria Azaz
Victoria Azaz has spent 19 years in publishing, both on the editorial and the sales and marketing sides of the business. Starting out as a Waterstone’s bookseller, she gravitated to Debrett’s Peerage and Europa Publications as an editor and from there to Cambridge University Press, where her Oxford University Russian 
degree made her indispensable. She worked as a marketing manager at Oxford University Press before joining Macmillan Publishers as the regional manager for Central and Eastern Europe, and as director of four of their Eastern European businesses. Now a freelance editor, she still works as an editor and proof reader for Macmillan. Victoria has been editor of the Good Book Guide. She speaks several languages.
Andrew Chapman
Andrew Chapman read English at the University of Edinburgh. In his 14 years in publishing, he has
been the editor of computer, recruitment and property magazines; the deputy editor of a religious newspaper (despite being an agnostic); and the editor of many non-fiction books on subjects as diverse as travel, dementia and science. Well-versed in communicating instructional material clearly and engagingly, he is the author of The Monster Guide to Jobhunting (2001), The A-Z of Genealogy Websites (2006), 101 Family History Tips (2006) and Actors’ Handbook 2007-8.
Andrew has written and edited for Dorling Kindersley, Pearson Education, The Independent, The Lawyer, Future Publishing, Trinity Mirror, Reed and many others. He is also an experienced book designer and typesetter who knows how to make a soft return after a swung dash. In his ’spare’ time he is the co-creator of the popular book recommendation website What Should I Read Next? and Oxford’s new fringe festival, Oxfringe.
Dexter Petley
Dexter Petley has published four critically acclaimed novels: Little Nineveh, Joyride, White Lies, One True Void, with Polygon, Fourth Estate and Two Ravens Press. White Lies was longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC and shortlisted for the Dazed & Confused award for Most Promising Writer 2003. He translated The Fishing Box by Maurice Genevoix from the original French (shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize) and is a regular contributor to Waterlog magazine for which he was voted New Angling Writer of the Year 2005. He is an experienced fiction editor and copy editor, has ghostwritten several autobiographies and is currently editing an anthology of new writing. He lives in a caravan in Normandy and when not writing he is fishing or working in his organic vegetable garden.
See Dexter’s blog at: http://caughtbytheriver.net/category/arcadia/, described as “… the weekly correspondence between angling’s most original contemporary writers, John Andrews and Dexter Petley.”
Dexter’s website is at www.dexterpetley.com
Brenda Stone
Brenda Stone has worked in publishing for over 30 years – starting as a graduate trainee at Cambridge University Press 
and finishing as publishing director at Oxford University Press, with stints at Macmillan, Longman, Letts, Hodder and Walker Books along the way. She has particular expertise in education, publishing for every subject area and every age-group, from pre-school to further education.
She has been the author of educational series for WHSmith, HarperCollins, Badger Publishing and Franklin Watts. Brenda lectures for the Publishing Training Centre, Oxford Brookes, and the MA in Publishing Studies at City University. She runs her own small poetry press, called Pisces Press, and organises the literary events programme for her local library.
Brenda also has extensive contacts in every sector of publishing.
Kate Prendergast
Kate Prendergast has been a writer and editor for more than twenty years. Her areas of interest include science and spirituality, archaeology and the environment. She won the University of London Derby-Bryce prize for History under the guidance of her tutor, David Starkey, and went on to take her
D.Phil. in Archaeology at the University of Oxford. She has taught Archaeology, Anthropology and History for Oxford, UEL and the OU.
Kate was Senior Writer for Science & Spirit, a Templeton Foundation-funded journal exploring issues in science and religion. She also contributed to the development of Pambazuka News, an award-winning website featuring news and comment on Africa. As a freelance writer, Kate has written for Marie-Claire, Islam Online, History Today, and BBC History. She has contributed to several books on archaeology, with a focus on religious and ritual practices in prehistory, and is currently working on a book on the Neolithic rock art of southern England. An active public speaker, she is a member of Rescue History! - a network of academics interested in exploring how the humanities can better enable our understanding of, and response to, climate change.
She is an experienced copywriter and editor, and has worked on online publishing projects for a wide range of public and independent sector clients.
Gill Oliver
Gill is a professionally trained journalist and editor with extensive experience of working for national and 
regional newspapers, consumer and specialist magazines and websites. She regularly writes features and supplements for the award-winning Oxford Times and its sister paper the Oxford Mail, as well as a number of business journals.
Recently she was commissioned to help with the launch of a consumer lifestyle publication for men, the success of which led to her being asked to help revamp an existing lifestyle magazine for women. As a professional copywriter of many years’ experience, Gill writes and edits website content, online fact sheets, brochures, leaflets, annual reports and speeches.
She has also edited and written newspapers and customer magazines for clients such as Woolwich Building Society, Selfridges and Reed Exhibitions.
Kamal Lathar
Kamal writes fantasy thrillers for YA. His first novel, The Changeling, published in 2006, is the story of a boy, Peter 
Badger, who goes in search of his missing father. The second in the series, The Eternal Well, a very dramatic telling of the rescue of a soul that could destroy the whole of existence, will be published soon. Currently, he is working on the third in the Changeling Saga, and a detective romance. In addition, he works on screen script development and on thrillers. Kamal is an expert on self-publishing and has helped set up many successful projects. He is also an international selling artist.
Visit his website: tarragonpublishing.com
Caroline Walton
Caroline Walton is the author of several books on Russia. The Besieged, a history/memoir on surviving the Siege of Leningrad, is to be published 
Little Tenement on the Volga which made the Harvard recommended reading list. Her novel, The Voice of Leningrad, won the New London Writers Award. She also works as a ghostwriter – specialising in East European and Jewish memoirs. A literary translator, in 2010 she translated a history of Kazakhstan by its President, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Caroline is a writing mentor, who is passionate about helping others release their talent.
Eleanor Blow
Eleanor Blow is a professional book editor and has worked in the publishing industry since 2006. Eleanor worked for s
everal years in academic and professional publishing, including as a Commissioning Editor at Elsevier.
She concentrates on commercial and trade publishing. Her areas of special interest are history and historical fiction, women’s and romance fiction.
Venetia Welby
Venetia is a professional novelist and teacher of writing with roots in journalism, literary fiction and travel. She has has a first class Classics degree from Oxford 
and a master’s in Comparative Literature from Kings College, London. Far from being an armchair critic, Venetia has lived and worked in the field in pursuit of authenticity in her writing and understanding of the work of others. To this end, she has lived on four continents and written three novels, a philosophical blog and an academic treatise. She has explored the journalistic worlds of food criticism, fashion (as assistant editor at Conde Nast), indie music and social/cultural commentary and has edited everything from manuscripts to menus, fiction to theses and websites to brochures. When not seeking out new countries and ideas, she is actively involved in the literary scenes of London and Oxford.
Publishing Consultant
Ilaria Meliconi
Ilaria graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in Astronomy in 1995, then went on to do an MSc and a DPhil in History of Science at the University of Oxford. She has worked in a variety of roles in academic publishing, from journal administrator to commissioning editor, and in subjects as varied as medicine, physics and statistics. She has worked with many high-profile academics and learned societies both in the UK and internationally.
She currently owns Hersilia Press, publishing crime fiction translated from the Italian, and consults with prospective authors and learned societies on their writing strategy.
With the Oxford Editors her consultancy concentrates on exploring various publishing options depending on the author’s requirements, whether self publishing or looking for a deal with the major houses.
