Authors

Stephen P. Williams is a journalist and author of works of nonfiction. He has written business and health columns for The New York Times and Newsweek, and has contributed regularly to Martha Stewart Living, GQ, The Smithsonian and other publications. With his current focus on blockchain, he is contributing to Breaker and Decrypt, two new cutting edge digital magazines about blockchain and the new distributed Internet. He heads a sustainable fashion startup called Wm. Williams, which will use blockchain technology to manage distributed manufacturing. He lives in New York, and has an MBA in Sustainability from Bard College and an MA in Communications from Stanford University.

TL Uglow is a contemporary writer and speaker on innovation and digital futures. Tea leads part of Google’s Creative Lab specialising in work with cultural organisations, artists, writers, and producers on experiments using digital technology at the boundaries of traditional cultural practice – across theatre, literature, history, cinema, music, science and the circus.

Ma Yan was a young Hui Muslim girl living with her family in a single-room house in rural China when her mother handed her diary to the French journalist Pierre Haski, who went on to translate it. Covering her 13th and 14th years, Ma Yan chronicles her struggle to escape hardship through her persistent, sometimes desperate, attempts to continue her schooling. Its publication was an international sensation, creating an outpouring of support for this courageous teenager and others like her.

Dr. Anne Cassard is a research fellow at INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) in France. She studies the mechanisms by which gut microbiota are involved in liver and metabolic diseases.

Luke Harding is an award-winning journalist and writer who has been reporting from Ukraine since 2007. In 2011 the Kremlin deported him from Russia, where he was The Guardian’s bureau chief, in the first case of its kind since the Cold War. In 2022 the Russian foreign ministry put him on an official blacklist. Luke is the author of eight acclaimed non-fiction books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Collusion: How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win; A Very Expensive Poison; Shadow State; and Mafia State. Invasion was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for political writing, and in Ukraine won Journalism Book of the Year 2023. His books have been translated into 30 languages. Two have been made into Hollywood movies: The Snowden Files and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. In 2019 Lucy Prebble adapted A Very Expensive Poison for the stage, with a premiere at London’s Old Vic theatre. The play won the Critics’ Circle award for best new play and was shortlisted for an Olivier Award. Luke lives in London and Kyiv.

 

Marie Robert is the new face of philosophy. She is the founder of four international schools, with a passion for teaching philosophy that leads her to constantly question the best way to put the philosophical discipline back at the centre of our daily lives. She is the best-selling author of When You Kant Figure it Out, Ask a Philosopher, which has been translated into 15 languages. Marie Robert also runs the podcast and Instagram account @philosophyissexy, with 4 million listeners and 285,000 followers across both platforms.

Eric Cantona was born in 1966. A former football player, and a legend at Manchester United to this day, he is renowned far beyond the world of sports. An artist, painter, actor and producer, he has featured in many plays and films, including Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric in 2009. His directness, commitment to social justice and sincerity make him one of the most unique personalities of our time.

Professor Gabriel Perlemuter is a renowned hepatology professor. He is the head of a research team at France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and of the hepato-gastroenterology department at Antoine-Béclère University Hospital. He previously coauthored a bestselling book on bacteria with Dr. Anne-Marie Cassard, a researcher in metabolic liver diseases.

Violaine Huisman was born in Paris in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York for the past twenty years. She is a novelist, a translator and the current Cultural Director of the FIAF in NY.

Her translations into French include David Grann’s True Crime and Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry.

Her début novel, The Book of Mother, originally published by Gallimard in France and Scribner in the US, was translated around the world. It was awarded the Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire and it was selected as one of The New York Times most notable books of 2021. It is currently being adapted for the screen.

Her second novel, Rose Désert, was published in 2019 by Gallimard.

Her third novel, The Monuments of Paris, will be published by Editions Gallimard in 2024 and by Penguin Press in the US.

Until September last year, he was deputy editor-in-chief for Europe for AFP and he now is a correspondent covering France, where he lives with his wife and their two children.