Charles Cordell is the author of ‘God’s Vindictive Wrath’, book #1 of the Divided Kingdom series of historical fiction set within the English Revolution and British Civil Wars. He is an author with experience as a soldier and diplomat on the ground in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, witnessing humanity at its best, its worst and its most desperate. His writing draws on time spent in the fraying margins of civilisation, as well as a deep study of the General Crisis of the 17th Century and its parallels today.

Author website: www.charlescordell.com

Leo Rawlings (1918-1990) was a private in the 137th Field Regiment Royal Artillery. A budding artist living in Blackpool, his life was changed forever by the war. Fighting from December 1941 to February 1942 as part of the headlong British retreat eventually leading to defeat in Singapore, he chronicled in pictures and words the campaign and the events that followed from 1941-1945. He drew what he witnessed around him, leading him to be unofficially commissioned to keep a visual record of the prisoners of war’s lives.

Clio Gray was born in Yorkshire, and, after a childhood spent first in Saltburn-by-the-Sea and then Devon, she went to London to study philosophy, then Leeds, where she completed a degree in the History of Art. Finally she took a Post Grad Dip Lib, and went into the public library service, where she remains now, after upping sticks to settle in the Highlands of Scotland.

In 2004, she won the Harry Bowling First Novel Award in 2004 and this led to the successful ‘Stroop’ series of crime novels set in the Napoleonic Wars and published by Headline.

She also won the Scotsman / Orange Award in 2006 for her short story: I Should Have Listened Harder and has maintained a keen interest in short stories ever since, both as a writer and as the founder of HISSAC: the Highlands and Islands Short Story Association. HISSAC organises an annual open short story competition and she is its Chair of Judges.

The Anatomist’s Dream is her first full-length literary novel.

Nikki Stafford is the author of companion guides to Xena, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Alias and Lost.

A self-confessed cult TV buff, she lives with her family in Toronto, Canada and blogs at nikkistafford.blogspot.co.uk

Jeanne Gask was born in Calais, France, the youngest daughter of expats Tom and Nell Sarginson. After the Second World War she married and settled in Teddington, Middlesex where she brought up her own family. Nell and the Girls is her story of her family’s wartime experience while trapped in occupied France.