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Contributors’ Biographies

Sharon Adam-Whitmore is based in Grand Cayman where she writes and teaches in the sciences. She has a special interest in marine ecology, drawing particularly on her experience as a skilled scuba diver and hyperbaric chamber technician.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is Reader Emeritus in Computational Mathematics, University of Hertfordshire. His publications include Nonlinear optimization with financial applications (2005) and Nonlinear optimization with engineering applications (2008). Poems from his two text books have an independent existence in Uneasy Relations (2007). His two poetry collections are Tell it Like it Might Be (2008) and Tradesman's Exit (2009). With the poet Nancy Mattson he organises the Poetry in the Crypt reading series at St Mary's church in Islington, London. http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/mikebartholomewbiggspage.html

William Bowler is a one-time investment analyst and stockbroker, and now runs his own private client advisory business in Cape Town. A keen observer of the dynamics of South African politics, economics and sport, he has lived in Johannesburg, Grand Cayman and Durban.  He became an unrepentant Capetonian in 2002.

James N. Butcher is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.  His career in psychology has been devoted to the study of personality assessment, abnormal psychology, and cross-cultural personality.  He began watercolour painting in 2000 during a sabbatical year in London and has continued painting along with his work in psychology.

Jessica Campbell (to 2010) is a teenage student at the Godolphin and Latymer School in London.

Katie Campbell has published two volumes of poetry, short stories and a novel, and more recently, while lecturing in Bristol University’s MA programme on the designed landscape, Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Design (2006) and Policies and Pleasaunces: A Guide to Scotland’s Gardens (2007). Her most recent book, Paradise of Exiles: The Anglo-American Gardens of Florence (2009), combines social history with horticulture, focusing on Italy’s late 19th century eccentric community of English and American expatriates.

Ilinca Cantacuzino is an artist and is a member of SWLA -  South London Women Artists.  www.southlondonwomenartists.co.uk   www.ilinca.co.uk

Fred D’Aguiar, London Grip’s 2008 Poetry Editor, is the Guyanese-British poet, playwright and novelist at present living in Virginia, USA.  He has received awards from, amongst others,  the Malcolm X Prize for Poetry, the Whitbread Prize for a first novel, the David Higham Fiction Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Michael Davenport has taught economics at the University of York, worked in the Treasury (U.K.), with the European Commission and as a consultant to developing countries in the arts of trade policy and negotiation.

João de Pina-Cabral, Research Coordinator at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, was the Founding President of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology (1989-1991) and President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2003-5).  He has done fieldwork and published extensively on the Alto Minho (Portugal), Macau (China) and Bahia (Brazil). He has been a Visiting Professor in the UK, Brazil, Spain and Mozambique.

Helen Donlon is the founder of Storm Agency Ibiza, specialising in both publishing rights and artist publicity. She is the author of David Lynch . . . a selection of his finest quotes.  She has contributed to various film and counterculture journals worldwide.

Clare Doyle is a bi-lingual freelance writer and management consultant based in south-west France. She has worked in the diplomatic service and elsewhere, and has lived in London, Brussels, Mexico City and the USA.  Now she combines some of her previous experience with an ambition to grow the best tasting tomatoes . . . and then there's always the novel!

Jenny Fabian spent her formative years at a boys' public boarding school before attending Francis Holland C of E School for Girls.  She married twice and had four children. After dropping out to become a so-called “unrepentant child of the sub-culture”, she dropped further out to work with horses and greyhounds.  She returned to the normal world about 2000 and now lives in London.  She has written for the Guardian, the Observer, Harper/Queen, Mojo, Uncut, Field, Wisden, and has contributed to various anthologies.

Ian Hollings (a pseudonym) has been working in sports journalism since 1999. A former sports editor of one of the UK's biggest selling regional newspapers, he is now editor of a leading sports website. He has won several awards for his writing. He is married and lives in Hertfordshire, UK.

Teresa Howard is a playwright, lyricist, theatre producer and journalist. She is in the process of setting up a Studio Theatre and Art Centre in Forest Hill, London, UK. www.possessedamusical.com

David Jacobson (FIEEE) is Director - Emerging Technologies in the Advisory Services practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, working in the Toronto office. He is the Canadian member of the PwC international technology network which includes the PwC Global Technology Centre resources in California, USA, the UK and Europe.

Phillip Kotokwa is a Zimbabwean sculptor working in African hard stone such as leopard stone, opal stone and serpentine stone. His work has been bought by collectors around the world.

Alan Lloyd retired to London from Herefordshire, UK.  He remains a trustee and founder member of the Ledbury Poetry Festival, which he also used to organise.

Judy Lloyd has worked variously as an assistant to Roman Polanski, as a Citizens Advice Bureau advisor, and in a book shop whilst bringing up three daughters. She gained a first class honours degree through the Open University and then an MA at Essex in Oral History before being awarded a PhD (2006) from UCL. She currently enjoys life in London.

Cathy Macaulay-Cornish is an architect with a master’s degree in town planning from the University of London, U.K. She lives  with her husband and two children in Melbourne, Australia where she works as an architect specialising in residential projects and sustainable design.  She also writes about planning and social issues.

Jane McChrystal is a London-based psychotherapeutic counsellor.  Her particular  research interests are in attachment difficulties and their effects on mental health.  She is currently involved in the development of a primary care-based brief psychotherapy service in north London.

Zygmunt Nowak-Soliński was born in Poland and spent much of his adult life in Scotland and France. He now lives in both Poland and Scotland, working as a freelance photographer, writer and translator.

Julia Pascal is a playwright, theatre director and Artistic Director of Pascal Theatre Company www.pascal-theatre.com.  The first woman director at the National Theatre, U.K., her plays have been produced in Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, the USA and are published by Oberon Books. As an arts critic she has written for the major broadsheets, the BBC, and was Dance Editor of City Limits. In London she teaches writing part-time for New York University and St Lawrence University. She was a NESTA Dream Time Fellow and Writer in Residence for the Wiener Library.

B. J. Rahn has an international reputation for her teaching, research, and writing about crime fiction.  She has published articles in, for example,  Scribner's Mystery and Suspense Writers, The Dictionary of Literary Biography and the Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Professor Rahn leads detective walking tours of sites in the lives and fiction of authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Margery Allingham in the U.K., and in the USA authors Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, Linda Fairstein and Edgar Allan Poe. www.crimecritic.com

Natalia Read is the West Midlands regional editor of the online publication ArtArtArt.   She has a degree from  the University of Bristol (2008) and recently completed a training programme with Matt Roberts Arts in London.

Ruth Rosengarten is an artist and art historian.  She was born in Israel and spent twelve years in South Africa before moving to London and then Lisbon where she lived and worked for twenty years.  Since 2002 she  has been living near Stamford, U.K. www.ruthrosengarten.com, http://ruthrosengarten.blogspot.com/

Michael Sangster trained at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. Principally concerned with the fall of light on objects,  he works from observation in still life, portraiture and landscape. He has a studio at Kensal Green.  www.michaelsangster.com

Phlebas & Shaw are a skilled SCUBA diving team committed to monitoring and revealing ecological devastation which development is causing to relatively unspoiled coastlines.

Jacques Touitou:  Depuis le premier jour ou j'ai commencé a me servir d'un pinceau et peintre,  je me suis consacré uniquement a mes quatre couleurs de prédeliction, le rouge, le blanc, le bleu et le jaune.  Pendant des années je me suis uniquement consacré a définir ma palette sur cette base de couleurs.  Ces couleurs répresent la nature et sa force, sa sensibilité et son romantisme. Le noir est la frontière.

Robert Vas Dias, London Grip’s current Poetry Editor, has published eight collections, the most recent of which was Still · Life and Other Poems of Art and Artifice (2010), and The Lascaux Variations: Fractals of Being (2009). An Anglo-American, his work has appeared in magazines in both the USA and Britain.  He is a core tutor with The Poetry School in London, UK, and writes on book art and artists’ books, particularly those which incorporate poetry and text.

Romano Viazzani is a musician - a performer, arranger and TV soundtrack composer.  For many years he has played and been recorded in ensembles and stage shows across Europe and the UK, with, amongst others, Grace Jones, Phil Manzanera (Roxy Music), and for several years, Gilad Atzmon and the Orient House Ensemble.  Most recently he performed in Songs From A Hotel Bedroom with Frances Ruffelle at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre. 

Gabriele vom Brück is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental & African Studies, London, and has carried out extensive research in Yemen.  She is the author of Islam, Memory and Morality in Yemen: Ruling Families in Transition and is co-author of The Anthropology of Names and Naming (C.U.P.). She is currently writing a biography of a woman who survived Yemen’s period of political upheaval in the late 1940s.

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