Monday 12th September

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Stephen King studied economics and philosophy at Oxford and is now HSBC's group chief economist and the Bank's global head of economics and asset allocation research. He is directly responsible for HSBC's global economic coverage and co-ordinates the research of HSBC economists all over the world.

Since 2001, Stephen has been writing a weekly column for The Independent. His first book, Losing Control, was published by Yale University Press in 2010. The book examines the impact of the emerging nations on western economic prosperity.

Stephanie Flanders has been BBC Economics Editor since April 2008. She has been a reporter at the New York Times (2001); a speech writer and senior advisor to the US Treasury Secretary (1997-2001); a Financial Times leader-writer and columnist (1993-7); and an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and London Business School. Her blog, Stephanomics, recently won the 2010 Harold Wincott Award for online journalism.

Mike Freer MP is Conservative Member of Parliament for Finchley & Golders Green.

**PROGRAMME ERROR**: please note this event is NOT taking place at 8.30pm as stated in the programme.

POSTPONED

Jill Norman is a highly respected author and editor. Her culinary career began when she created the food and wine list for Penguin Books. In the process she learned to appreciate and to cook the foods of many parts of the world. This led to travels in pursuit of food and drink, and a passion to discover the origins of herbs and spices and how they are used. She is acknowledged internationally as an authority on herbs and spices. Her books on food and cooking have been widely translated and won awards in many countries.

Jill's interests also extend to wine and she talks and writes on food and wine pairing and on travels through wine lands.

A founder-member of the London Slow Food Convivium, she is a regular contributor at the Oxford Food Symposium, literary trustee of the Elizabeth David estate, and a trustee of the Jane Grigson Trust. She has recorded her life story for the National Sound Archive at the British Library.

POSTPONED

Sam Leith was, until recently, the Literary Editor of the Telegraph. He now writes for many leading publications including the Guardian and the Evening Standard. His previous books, Dead Pets and Sods Law, have been published to critical acclaim. The Coincidence Engine is his first novel and has been selected as one of the Waterstone's 11 - a major new initiative created to uncover and champion the very best debut fiction.

'Thirty years of wit, wisdom, gossip and intimacy from Diana Athill, one of the nation's bestselling authors and best-loved authors, in the first collection of her letters to be published.'

These letters to the American poet Edward Field reveal a sharply intelligent woman with a brilliant sense of humour, a keen eye for the absurd, a fierce loyalty and a passionate zest for life. This intimate correspondence spanning thirty years covers her final years as an editor at Andre Deutsch, her retirement and immersion in her own writing, her growing fame and encroaching old age, and gives a fascinating insight into a life fully lived.

Trudy Gold is Chief Executive of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and senior lecturer in Jewish history which she has taught for 25 years. She is editor in chief of the teaching resource pack "Lessons of the Holocaust".

Clare Clark is the author of two highly acclaimed historical novels: The Great Stink (long listed for the Orange Prize) and The Nature of Monsters. Born in 1967, she graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge with a double first in History, and now lives in London with her husband and two children. Her latest book, Savage Lands was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 & chosen as a BBC History Book of the Year.

'Vigorous and intense, energetic and absorbing... An extraordinary feat of imagination' Hilary Mantel

'Richly and densely textured, serious, intelligent, passionately written, and with more than a hint of gothic, the story pushes the reader to examine its central point: who are the savages?' Sunday Times

'Clare Clark writes with the eyes of a historian and the soul of a novelist' Amanda Foreman

Lucie Whitehouse was born in Warwickshire in 1975, read Classics at Oxford University and now lives in London. She is author of The House at Midnight and The Bed I Made.

Nicci French is the pen name for husband and wife team of journalist Nicci Gerrard and writer Sean French, authors of seamless and highly popular crime novels, including The Memory Game, The Safe House, Killing Me Softly, Beneath the Skin, The Red Room and Losing You. Blue Monday is their latest novel.

Peter Guttridge is a crime critic and novelist. He has been the crime fiction critic of the Observer for eleven years. The Times has said that his new Brighton trilogy - City of Dreadful Night, The Last King of Crime and The Thing Itself "demonstrates his great skill as a writer of English provincial noir" whilst crime author Mark Billingham says of it: "There are two words running through this darkly delicious piece of Brighton rock: 'must read'." His six satirical crime novels are described as "de rigueur reading" by the Good Book Guide. He has chaired many events - crime and non-crime - at a wide range of literature festivals but this is his first appearance at the Hampstead and Highgate Festival.

Photo Credit: Mark Read

Rebecca Hunt graduated from Central Saint Martins College with a first class honours degree in fine art. She is a successful painter and lives in London. Mr Chartwell is her startlingly original debut novel. It was chosen for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime and long listed for the Guardian First Book Award.

'Marvellously original, tender and funny. Hunt proves herself to be a gifted writer' Daily Mail

'Extraordinary, very good, engrossing'
Daily Telegraph

'Charming, funny, moving, finely crafted and engagingly evocative'
Independent

'Charming, original, rewarding, entertaining'
Financial Times

'Brilliantly original and thought-provoking. Hunt tackles a serious topic with humour and intelligence'
Sunday Express

'A real joy to read: funny, clever and original. A darkly comic debut that hits all the right notes'
Scotsman

'Audacious, exuberantly imagined, terrific. Bold, original and frequently very funny' Guardian

Once upon a time it was easy to find books you could enjoy and which felt relevant to your life. Now a new book is published every 30 seconds - the choice is overwhelming. A Bibliotherapy consultation is the perfect way to discover those amazing but often elusive works of literature that can illuminate and even change your life. We are offering taster sessions so you can sample what Bibliotherapy is all about.

Following the lives of a group of women who are married to, and mothers of, members of 2 Royal Welsh battalion, Daffodil Girls is an insightful, moving account of the women behind the men on the frontline.

Kitty Dimbleby has been working as a journalist for 10 years writing for the Evening Standard, Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. She has also contributed articles to The Times, The Guardian, London Lite, Cosmopolitan and Metro. Reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan made her a third generation war correspondent, following in the distinguished footsteps of her father, Jonathan Dimbleby and grandfather, Richard Dimbleby. Herself an army wife, she is married to a Captain in the Kings Royal Hussars. They live in the Army Garrison town of Tidworth, Wiltshire.

Paula Kitching is an historian (specialising in Genocide and war studies), educational consultant and writer, who has been working with the London Jewish Cultural Centre for over fifteen years. She was an advisor to the Department of Education for over five years and currently works with the Historical Association, the Royal British Legion and HMDT (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust).

POSTPONED

Virginia Nicholson's new book, Millions Like Us, tells the story of the women's war, through a host of individual women's experiences.

Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1955. Her father was the writer and academic Quentin Bell, acclaimed for his biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf. Her mother Anne Olivier Bell edited the five volumes of Virginia Woolf's Diaries.

Virginia grew up in the suburbs of Leeds. Later, after moving to Sussex, Virginia became increasingly involved with the Trust that administered Charleston, home of her grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell. Her first book (co-authored with her father) Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden was published by Frances Lincoln in 1997. In November 2002 Viking published Among The Bohemians - Experiments in Living 1900-1939 and in 2007 Viking published Singled Out - How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War, both to critical acclaim.
Virginia is married to screenwriter and author William Nicholson; she has three children and lives near Lewes, Sussex.

Jill McGivering is an award-winning BBC broadcaster and writer. She's covered foreign news for BBC radio and television for almost twenty years. Her first novel, The Last Kestrel, looks at the impact of the war in Afghanistan. Her second, Far From My Father's House, is set in North-West Pakistan.

For her latest and sixth novel, acclaimed novelist and Sunday Times columnist Daisy Waugh, acclaimed novelist and Sunday Times columnst, has spent 14 years researching the life of Rudolph Valentino for her latest and sixth novel. She used to write a weekly newspaper column from Los Angeles about her attempts to become a Hollywood scriptwriter.

Anne Sebba is one of Britain's most distinguished biographers. Having joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent, she went on to write eight works of non-fiction, mostly about iconic women, presented BBC radio documentaries, and is an accredited Nadfas lecturer. She will be talking about her book That Woman on Wallis Simpson.

Justine Picardie is a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine and writes for Harpers Bazaar. Her latest book is the beautifully illustrated Sunday Times bestselling Biography Coco Chanel: The Legend and The Life. She is also the author of Daphne, If the Spirit Moves You: Life and Love After Death, the novel Wish I May and My Mother's Wedding Dress.

Christopher Stevens is an author and newspaper journalist. His authorised biography of Kenneth Williams, (John Murray, October 2010), was broadcast as Radio 4's Book of The Week, and shortlisted for the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography. His next book, Galton and Simpson: The Men Who Invented Sitcom (Michael O'Mara Books) will be published in September 2011.

Melissa Katsoulis is the author of Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes, and a regular contributor to The Times and The Sunday Telegraph. Her work has also appeared in the FT, The New Statesman, The Ham and High and The Literary Review. Formerly a staff writer on The Times, she is now a freelance literary journalist and lives in North London.

Photo Credit (Daisy Waugh): The Sunday Times

Jake Wallis Simons latest book The English German Girl has been nominated for the inaugural Fiction Uncovered award. Jake is a novelist, journalist and graphic artist. His first novel, The Exiled Times of a Tibetan Jew, was named by the Independent on Sunday as a Book of the Year. He writes for the Times, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, the Telegraph, La Repubblica and other publications and contributes to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent.

Noel Holland is the pseudonym of the writing team of Noel Fursman and Julia Holland. Their memoir Rosie's War is a thrilling memoir of an Englishwoman's escape from occupied France. Rosie, was Julia's mother, Rosemary Say. Julia and Noel live in the south-west of Ireland, running a secondhand bookshop, Noel & Holland Books.

Praise for Rosie's War:
Terrific, a most remarkable and wonderfully atypical wartime story Barry Norman

Oliver Harris was born in North London in 1978. He attended Camden Sixth Form College followed by UCL, from which he has a BA and an MA in English Literature. He is currently completing a PhD on psychoanalysis and Greek myth, supervised at Birkbeck, where he teaches on the undergraduate English course. The Hollow Man is his first novel.

Photo Credit: Eammon McCabe

POSTPONED

Maximum number of people: 15 - script to be sent to sarah@ljcc.org.uk by Friday 28 August

Sue will provide practical tips on both writing and producing and facilitate an open group discussion of each submitted piece, with the playwright included in the process. Each playwright should come prepared to give a quick synopsis of their play and to answer questions.

Sue Guiney writes and teaches fiction, poetry and plays and her work has appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic. Her first book, published in 2006, is the text of her poetry play, Dreams of May. This was followed by two novels, Tangled Roots, in 2008, and A Clash of Innocents in 2010. Sue is also Artistic Director of theatre arts charity Curving Road, has produced plays in both London's Fringe and West End Theatres, and has mentored scores of budding playwrights.

Once upon a time it was easy to find books you could enjoy and which felt relevant to your life. Now a new book is published every 30 seconds - the choice is overwhelming. A Bibliotherapy consultation is the perfect way to discover those amazing but often elusive works of literature that can illuminate and even change your life. We are offering taster sessions so you can sample what Bibliotherapy is all about.

POSTPONED

Lizzie Collingham is the author of The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food as well as Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors and Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj. Having taught History at Warwick University she became a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is now an independent scholar and writer.

In the course of researching her books she has travelled to the South Pacific, Australia, Japan, India, France and Germany. She lives near Cambridge with her husband and small daughter.

Paula Kitching is an historian (specialising in Genocide and war studies), educational consultant and writer, who has been working with the London Jewish Cultural Centre for over fifteen years. She was an advisor to the Department of Education for over five years and currently works with the Historical Association, the Royal British Legion and HMDT (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust).

Julie Myerson is the author of Sleepwalking, The Touch, Me and the Fat Man, Laura Blundy, Something Might Happen, The Story of You and Out of Breath. Her new book, Then, is described by the Guardian as 'Compulsively readable and richly inventive... bittersweet, authentic and lovable.'

Kate Kellaway is a staff writer on the Observer newspaper where she has served as deputy literary editor, poetry editor, deputy theatre critic and children's books editor and literary critic. She lives in North London and has six sons: two stepsons and four sons.

Sarah Gristwood & Kate Williams

Sarah Gristwood's first historical novel, The Girl in the Mirror, was published this summer by HarperCollins. She is also the author of three historical biographies; Arbella: England's Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester, both of which reached the bestseller lists, and Perdita, which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week. A former film journalist, writing for papers that include the Guardian, The Times, and the London Evening Standard, she has lived in Highgate for more than twenty years.

As one of the 'History Girls' alongside Kate Williams, Alison Weir and Tracy Boreman, Sarah is a very popular literary speaker and has also co-written a book on royal weddings, The Ring and the Crown.

Kate Williams is the author of England's Mistress, Becoming Queen and the co-author of The Ring and the Crown. She appears regularly on TV and radio. Her historical novel, The Pleasures of Men, is soon to be published.

Justin Cartwright's novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers and the acclaimed White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award, The Promise of Happiness, winner of the 2005 Hawthorden Prize and, most recently, the acclaimed The Song Before It Is Sung. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London. Other People's Money, published by Bloomsbury in March 2011, is both a subtle thriller and an acutely delineated portrait of a world and a class.

David Horspool is History Editor at the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of The English Rebel (Viking) and Why Alfred Burned the Cakes (Profile), and writes for The Times, Sunday Times, Guardian and Daily Telegraph.

Blake Morrison is the author of two bestselling memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me, three novels and a study of the Bulger case, As If. His latest novel The Last Weekend is an age-old tale of jealousy and revenge with a contemporary flavor. He is also a poet, critic, journalist and librettist and teacher at Goldsmiths College.

Edmund Gordon was born in 1982. He reviews regularly for the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement, and has also written for the Financial Times, the Guardian, Literary Review, the London Review of Books, New Statesman, the Observer, and the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. He is writing the authorised biography of Angela Carter, which will be published by Chatto & Windus in 2015.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Maximum number of people: 25

In this workshop, Nick will show you how to trace your family history, evaluate the importance of the stories you are researching, and then prepare material for publication - offering tips and advice about which writing style is most appropriate, and various routes you could consider to see your work in print.

Nick Barratt, ia a historian and broadcaster, a PhD in state finance and fiscal history and was lead researcher and consultant for Who Do You Think You Are when first launched on BBC. He has also presented So You Think You're Royal, History Mysteries, Hidden House History, Secrets from the Attic and Live the Dream As Seen on Screen and written books such as Who Do You Think You Are Encyclopedia of Family History; Guide to Your Ancestors' Lives; Lost Voices of the Titanic.

Barbara Taylor Bradford has had 25 books published, all bestsellers, with over 82 million copies sold in over 40 languages in more than 90 countries. In June 2007, Barbara was awarded an OBE for her contribution to Literature. In May 2010, Barbara was honoured by Literacy Partners at their annual gala dinner for her philanthropy in raising critical funds for disadvantaged New Yorkers.

Her new novel Letter From A Stranger, is released in September: One day a letter arrives at its intended destination - Connecticut. The addressee, Deborah Nolan, no longer lives there but the house is used on weekends by her twin children, Justine and Richard. On opening the letter, Justine discovers that her maternal grandmother is still alive. At eighty years old, Leah has written to her daughter Deborah, begging for reconciliation after ten estranged years. Justine, consumed with this revelation, traces her grandmother to Istanbul and immediately flies out to see her.

Justine throws herself into her grandmother's glamorous lifestyle, and falls for the delectable Jake, Leah's best friend Anita's American grandson. But she has a life far away, and she's a long way from Connecticut...

Suspecting more to her mother and grandmother's estrangement than the story of greed told to her, Justine digs deep into Leah's past and discovers some painful truths. Justine uncovers the horrors of Leah's life in in Nazi Germany.

Uncertain of what the final outcome of Leah and Deborah's relationship will be, Justine wonders if the unfixable can be fixed, and if Leah's happy reunion with her grandchildren is enough...

Trudy Gold is Chief Executive of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and senior lecturer in Jewish history which she has taught for 25 years. She is editor in chief of the teaching resource pack "Lessons of the Holocaust".

David Bellos is Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, where he is also Professor of French and Comparative Literature. He has won many awards for his translations of Georges Perec, Ismail Kadare and others, including the Man Booker Translator Award, and received the Prix Goncourt de la biographie for his book on Perec.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Surprising, witty and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about us, and how we understand each other.

Misha Glenny, author of the international bestseller McMafia, uses his latest book Dark Market: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You to explore three fundamental threats facing us in the 21st century: cyber crime, cyber warfare and cyber industrial espionage.

An award winning journalist and historian, he is consulted by governments on major policy issues and has also run an NGO assisting with the reconstruction of Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo.

Professor Richard Susskind OBE is IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice, President of the Society for Computers and Law, and Chairman-elect of the Advisory Board at the Oxford Internet Institute. He holds professorships at Oxford University, Strathclyde University, and Gresham College. He is a regular columnist at The Times and the author of numerous books on law and technology, including The End of Lawyers? and The Future of Law. His work has been translated into 10 languages, and he has been invited to speak in over 40 countries. He has a doctorate in computers and law from Balliol College, Oxford.

Photo Credit: Ralph Glenny