James Ball is the author and creator of History’s Heroes and Villains, a collection of short graphic novels which is due for publication by Penguin Random House in July 2027. He has also written over a dozen school textbooks and revision guides. These include the best-selling Invasion, Plague and Murder series for Oxford University Press, which is currently the most widely used KS3 course in UK schools. He considers himself a generalist and, after spending nearly 20 years as a history teacher and head of department, his main area of focus and expertise is writing history books for children and young adults. However, he has also had a pre-Columbian history of the peoples of North America published by Flame Tree, which is squarely aimed at adult readers. James lives in beautiful, historic St Albans with his partner and daughter.

Nick Beckett is the pen name of Niall Boyce. Niall studied medicine at Oxford University and subsequently trained as a psychiatrist. In 2023, he completed a PhD on “dreaming in Renaissance England” at Birkbeck College, London. He has written on Renaissance life and culture for Shakespeare’s Globe and the King’s College London Centre for Early Modern Studies. Alongside his day job as an editor at The Lancet, he is busy writing the next novel in the Simon & Kate Mayfield mystery series.

Rosemary Griggs is an author, researcher, seamstress and popular West Country speaker. She has been researching Devon’s sixteenth century history for years, focussing on one well-connected family, the Champernownes.

Alongside her writing Rosemary researches, creates and wears sixteenth-century clothing, and brings the past to life through a unique blend of theatre, history and re-enactment. Her appearances and talks for museums and community groups all over the West Country draw on her extensive research into sixteenth-century Devon, Tudor life and Tudor dress.

Margaret’s writing career began with Longman ELT Division (now Pearson), and later Oxford University Press and Macmillan Education. She has written a wide range of ELT books, from pre primary to tertiary levels. Some were for specific countries i.e. Egypt, and many were for the global market.
Since 2018 Margaret has focused on writing a series of children’s historical fiction time travel books.
Spirals of Time comprises five books.
The first, The Bronze Mirror, is set in the wild Welsh Marches of the late fourteenth century. The discovery of an ancient mirror at a dig near Tintern Abbey begins the quest.

Angela is a writer of “compelling and extensively researched” historical fiction. Now retired, her professional background included 27yrs in clinical cardiology and 15yrs as a university lecturer, but her keen interest in the art and history of the Italian Renaissance sowed the seed for her first book, The Rose of Florence (2023), followed by Hiding the Flame (2025). She lives in Cardiff, UK, visiting Florence whenever she can.

Lottie Taylor studied history at St John’s College, Cambridge, specialising in European history and her pet project, the history of Esperanto. Since leaving Cambridge, she has worked in a number of fields and settled on the island of Madeira with her husband and furry children. She currently works in marketing but is collaborating with her father, military historian Prit Buttar, on studying the history of occupied cities during WWII.