Authors
Nate Hopper, former Ideas Editor of (ironically) Time and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, brings his reporting and research background to this masterful and fascinating investigation of what time is, has been, and will be. This past September, his groundbreaking New Yorker piece “The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time” about the how the internet keeps (and fails to keep) the time, was a sensation, and now it has evolved into The Time: A Biography of the One Thing We All Agree On.
On behalf of Spiegel & Grau
With a degree from LSE, Lucie Mikaélian is a TV journalist ‘C Politique’ on France 5. Her rediscovered diaries became a hit Instagram account and then a record-breaking podcast in France.
Paul Pavlowitch is a writer. The Immortals is his seventh published work. Between 1973 and 1981 he played the part of Emile Ajar – the pseudonym under which his cousin, Romain Gary, won the Prix Goncourt for the second time.
Margaret Renkl is the author of The Comfort of Crows, Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South and Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. The founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.
On behalf of Spiegel & Grau.
Kevin Leivers founded The Naked Pharmacy in 2016 after a 40-year career in both conventional and natural pharmaceutical industries. He left Pfizer to become Chief Pharmacist for the Swiss Herbal manufacturer Weleda and then founded an international research and development company, where he helped develop a number of award-winning medicines, including a new natural treatment for Acne Vulgaris using a bioactive from the digestion of broccoli, called Diindolylmethane (DIM) which is now an international bestseller. He lives in Guildford with his family.
On behalf of New River.
Polly Vernon has been a features writer, interviewer and columnist for 18 years. She now writes primarily for The Times and Grazia. She started as a junior writer on Minx, a riotous young woman’s magazine, which launched in the late 90s as a female response to Loaded. Since being picked up as the Guardian’s youngest ever Comments and Analysis columnist, she has written for every publication from Vogue to The Telegraph, and has interviewed everyone from David Cameron to Hugh Jackman via Donald Trump. And Take That. And One
Direction. And Piers Morgan, for whom she has an enduring fondness. But don’t tell anyone.
On behalf of New River.
João Moreira Salles was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1962. Founder of piauí magazine, film producer and documentarist, he directed Nelson Freire (2003), Entreatos [Intermissions] (2004), Santiago (2006), No intenso agora [In the Intense Now] (2017), among other feature films. Along with Branca Vianna Moreira Salles, he founded the first private Brazilian institute to the promotion of science, Serrapilheira. He also lectured documentary classes at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ) and at Princeton University.
In 1987, along with his brother Walter Salles Jr.—the awarded director of Abril despedaçado [Behind the Sun] and On the Road—, he started Videofilmes, one of the most important production companies of the so-called “cinema da retomada” (1995-2002), a blooming period in the country’s filmmaking after a long hiatus of the industry. Among the titles produced are Lavoura arcaica [To the Left of the Father] by Luiz Fernando Carvalho; Madame Satã by Karim Aïnouz; Babilônia 2000 and Edifício Master [Master, a Building in Copacabana] by Eduardo Coutinho.
In that same year, João directed China, o Império do Centro and wrote the script for the documentary Krajcberg, o poeta dos vestígios, for which he received awards in Italy, Cuba and Brazil. He was also the recipient of an award in Paris for the TV special Blues (1990), a co-production aired by Manchete network. Between 1991 and 1996, he worked in advertising. In 1998, João released the series Futebol, co-directed by Arthur Fontes. The following year, with Kátia Lund, came Notícias de uma guerra particular [News from a Personal War], a documentary about the drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro and its impact on the community.
Between May 1999 and May 2000, João coordinated a group formed by journalists Dorrit Harazim, Flávio Pinheiro, Marcos Sá Corrêa, Zuenir Ventura and filmmakers Arthur Fontes and Izabel Jaguaribe. They worked on a series of feature films mixing artistic experimentation and investigative journalism. With the purpose of showing Brazil under a new light, the docuseries entitled 6 histórias brasileiras [6 Brazilian Stories] premiered in August 2000, with two episodes directed by João.
In 2002, João Moreira Salles released Nelson Freire, about the career of the world-renowned classical pianist. Later that year, he filmed the backstages of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidential campaign for the documentary Entreatos [Intermissions, 2004]. In 2007, he released Santiago, an affective documentary about a former butler of the Moreira Salles family, and in 2017 came No intenso agora [In the Intense Now], made with archive footage from cultural movements of the 1960s such as the Prague Spring and May 68 in France.
Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018). She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon (Tia Chucha Press, 2022); One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press); the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) also shortlisted for WA State 2018 Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press). Her most recent non-fiction is in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage). Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna arrived in the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, she writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
Represented by Stephanie Cabot.
Helen Ledwick is a former BBC journalist and award-nominated podcast creator. She worked as a senior producer and on-air voice at BBC Radio 5 Live for more than a decade, after starting her career in local radio and spending time as a producer on BBC Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. In 2020, she launched Why Mums Don’t Jump, a podcast about pelvic floor problems after childbirth, which has grown out of her own experience of pelvic floor prolapse. She lives with her husband and two children in Manchester, and very much enjoys a good cup of tea in a nice mug.
Represented by Thérèse Coen.
Jennifer Carson is a novelist, essayist, and book critic. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Barnes & Noble Review, Science, Six Hens Journal and Los Angeles Times. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars and was a writer-in-residence at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods and at Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She is also the founder of the literary organization To the Lighthouse. Formerly an astrophysicist, she holds an SB in physics from MIT and a PhD in astrophysics from UCLA.
Represented by Stephanie Cabot.