Cressida Downing has over 20 years of experience in publishing and bookselling, from the manuscript to the finished book.

Her freelance clients have included Reader's Digest, a variety of agents, publishers and literary scouts, and aspiring authors. In recent years, she has focused on blogging (writing for www.writersandartists.co.uk), running workshops for writers, and giving advice to bloggers who are interested in breaking into mainstream publishing.

A passionate reader, she lives in a village north of Cambridge and enjoys the local writing scene.

After nearly forty years in the teaching profession, Sylvia has retired to concentrate on writing full time. Sylvie has had some success with her first published book, 'The Bubble.' The second published book called 'Home to Roost' is a very readable family saga set in East Anglia. She has also had several short stories published in a Cambridgeshire magazine. Her third novel, 'Starting Out,' is complete and will be published in 2012. She is currently working on a history of the village of Swaffham Prior where she grew up. Sylvia lives in East Anglia.

Rosemary read law at Churchill College, practised as a solicitor in London and raised  three children. in 2005 Dublin's Wolfhound Press published her ghost novel for 10-14 year olds What You See Is What You Get.  The Most Intimate Place followed in 2009 (Maia Press) and was described in the Guardian as 'A gripping, plausible and beautifully written literary thriller’. Rosemary has also written drama, collections of humour and in November 2010 her collection of short poems, Sweet Seventeens.

Tim Love will lead a workshop whose exercises will focus on first on single words, then the art of writing sentences (Austen, James, etc), and finally micro-fiction. He's had many stories published, some of which will appear in his story pamphlet "By All Means" (Nine Arches Press) later this year.

A leading figure at the interface between science and literature, Gillian Beer is former President of Clare Hall College in Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been twice a judge for the Booker Prize, the second time as chair.

Among her books are Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996).

John Cornwell is an author, journalist and Fellow Commoner of Jesus College, Cambridge where he directs the Science and Human Dimension Project, a public understanding of science programme, and the Rustat Conferences. He has written for many well known publications including The Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Nature, Financial Times, Prospect, New Statesman, Spectator, TLS, The Tablet, New York Times and The Observer.

He is author of twenty books including Darwin's Angel, An Angelic Response to the The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins); Hitler's Pope - The Secret History of Pius XII: A Thief in the Night (see cover image below); Power to Harm; Earth to Earth; three novels and a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

A Clinical Veterinary Anatomist at Cambridge University, David is also the author of five popular science books about about the brain, X chromosomes, pregnancy, teenagers and the middle age.