Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll was an English Mathematician, logician and author, most famous for his contributions to the genre of literary nonsense. His novels Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as his poems The Jabberwocky and Hunting the Snark have proved extremely popular, and have embedded themselves in modern cultural consciousness in Britain and abroad.

James De Mille

James De Mille (1833–80) was a Canadian academic who published many works of popular fiction. He is mostly known today for his posthumous novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.

Stefan Zweig

One of the most prominent European writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) left his native Austria in 1934 following the rise of Nazism, committing suicide in exile in Brazil.

Mikhail Lermontov

A soldier in the Russian army stationed in the Caucasus, Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) became a hugely famous and influential Romantic poet. His life was cut short in a duel with a fellow officer.

Xavier de Maistre

Xavier De Maistre (1763–1852) was an aristocrat and army officer and is best known for his mock-travelogue A Journey around my Room, which he wrote while under arrest for having participated in a duel.

Tim Parks

Tim Parks is the author of twenty novels, including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, In Extremis and, most recently, Mr Geography, all of which have been translated into many languages. As well as being a novelist and the author of several works of non-fiction, Tim is the acclaimed translator of books by Moravia, Calvino, Machiavelli and other Italian writers. He is a regular contributor to the TLS, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.

Read an interview with Tim Parks here

Louise Miller

Born in England (1968) and educated mainly in Canada, Louise Miller has a Master’s degree in both politics and law. A Fine Brother is her first book. She has been recently involved with a documentary on the subject of the work of British women in Serbia during the First World War, which was shown in February 2011 on Serbia’s RTS 2 to an audience of one million.