our authors

 Paul Vallely was covering the 1984–85 famine in Ethiopia for The Times when he and Bob Geldof first met. Geldof asked him to travel across Africa with him in 1985 to decide how to spend the £140 million raised by Live Aid. He co-wrote Bob’s bestselling autobiography Is That It and wrote a number of publications on Live Aid and Live 8 for the Band Aid Trust. 

He was chair of two international development agencies, Traidcraft and the Catholic Institute for International Relations and is a senior research fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.

 Peter Doggett has been writing professionally about popular music and 20th-century culture since 1980. His many books include You Never Give Me Your Money, about the breakup of the Beatles and its aftermath; There’s a Riot Going On, chronicling the links between rock music and revolutionary politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and a biography of David Bowie’s 1970s recorded output, The Man Who Sold the World. He lives in London.

 Alexander Larman is the bestselling author of six acclaimed works of historical biography. As a David Bowie fanatic of decades' standing, the opportunity to write about his hero has been both a professional and personal privilege. He works as the books editor for The Spectator's US edition, The Spectator World, and regularly writes about literature, history and culture for titles including The Spectator, Prospect, the Daily Telegraph and the Oberserver, as well as serving as theatre critic for The Critic. He lives in London and Oxford with his wife Nancy and daughter Rose.

Kara Manning is an award-winning music and arts journalist, radio presenter and playwright. She is the director of music content and communications and a live session presenter for New York’s WFUV, an NPR affiliate, where she also hosts and produces UKNY, a weekly programme dedicated to British and global music. A former MTV News reporter and Rolling Stone staff writer, she also wrote liner notes for the Grammy-nominated Rhino boxset Respect: A Century of Women in Music. 

Caroline Hunt is a London-born communications specialist whose career spans some of the world’s most culturally influential organisations, including BBC, Disney and Apple. Working at the intersection of music, culture and storytelling, she has spent years shaping narratives and amplifying creative voices behind the scenes. A lifelong radio obsessive, her work is driven by a belief in the power of music-led communities and the stories that bind them. 

NJ Stevenson is the co-author of Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of Leigh Bowery’s 1980s London, author of The Chronology of Fashion and contributor to publications including ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell, Kaffe Fassett: The Artist's Eye and Bill Gibb: Reviewing His Fashion Legacy in the 21st Century. She co-curated the exhibition Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London. She was fashion director of Port Eliot Festival of the Arts and is a lecturer and member of the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion. NJ came to London in the late 1980s to study English literature but discovered nightclubs and never left. She is currently considering the possibilities of the ‘afternoon soirée’. 

 Graeme Thomson is the critically acclaimed music writer and author of biographies on Simple Minds, Kate Bush and George Harrison. Over the past 25 years, his features, interviews, reviews and criticism have appeared in the Observer, New Statesman, the Guardian, Radio Times, The Word, Uncut, the Telegraph, GQ, Time Out, the Herald, Sunday Herald, Mojo, Esquire, the Sunday Express and Rolling Stone.

Benji Wilson is a TV critic for the Telegraph. He gives star ratings to television programmes (and is in turn rated on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic). He also reviews books and has written a column on media and tech in Private Eye for more than a
decade. As well as contributing features and interviews for The Sunday Times Culture magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald and USA Today, he is a regular TV critic on BBC Radio and a host for Bafta and the BFI. His Uber rating is currently 4.8. 

 Richard Coker is an emeritus professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He worked with HIV/AIDS patients in the early years of the pandemic as a consultant at St Mary’s Hospital, London, and on tuberculosis and HIV control in London and New York City (at Columbia School of Public Health and at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine). He later led research on tuberculosis, HIV and other communicable diseases in the former Soviet Union and South-East Asia. 

He is the author of From Chaos to Coercion: Detention and the Control of Tuberculosis, and has written multiple research papers, edited books and chapters in edited books. His writing has also appeared in the Guardian. He lives in Bangkok with his wife Airada.

 Bob Stanley is a writer, musician, DJ and film producer. Since founding influential pop group Saint Etienne, Bob has enjoyed a parallel career as a music journalist, contributing to publications including The Times, Smash Hits, NME, the Guardian and the Face. A former artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre and winner of the British Library Eccles Award, he has curated several film seasons for the Barbican. He is the author of Yeah Yeah Yeah, which was The Sunday Times Pop Music Book of the Year and a Rough Trade Book of the Year; Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop; and The Bee Gees: Children of the World. The Open University awarded him an honorary degree for contributions to popular culture in 2023. He lives in West Yorkshire.  

Nige Tassell is the critically acclaimed author of both music and sporting biographies. His Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? (Nine Eight, 2022) and Searching for Dexys Midnight Runners (Nine Eight, 2025) were both Penderyn Prize nominated. His writing has also appeared in the Guardian, The Word, The Sunday Times, the Independent, Q, GQ, Esquire, New Statesman, the TLS, FourFourTwo, The Blizzard and When Saturday Comes among many others.

 Rodge Glass is the author of nine books. These include the novels No Fireworks, Hope for Newborns and Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs, the collection Stories for the EasyJet Generation, a graphic novel, Dougie’s War: A Soldier’s Story (with Dave Turbitt) and Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, which won a Somerset Maugham Award for non-fiction. His work has been nominated for multiple national and international awards. Rodge is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland, he has appeared at book festivals from New York to Rome to Toronto, written audio stories for children, and several of his books, stories and articles have been translated into languages such as Italian, French, Spanish and Serbian. Prior to As One: Remaking Suede, Rodge’s recent work includes Michel Faber: The Writer & his Work (2023) and Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir (2024), a chapter of which, ‘On the Covenant’, won the Anne Brown Essay Prize. Joshua in the Sky was also nominated for Saltire Society Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2025. Rodge is currently reader in creative writing at the University of Strathclyde.

 Komali Scott-Jones is current A&R Director at AWAL and former A&R Manager at Parlophone Records. She is also co-founder of The DEBRIEF; a quarterly event established in 2019, which was created to empower, connect and celebrate Black Women and Women of Colour music executives, while they navigate an industry that largely overlooks their unique experiences.

Komali is also a founding member of the Black Music Coalition, an organisation launched in 2020 as a direct response to the death of George Floyd, which breathed new life into the Black Lives Matter movement. It is dedicated to eradicating the racial disparities and systemic barriers affecting Black employees/executives, including freelancers and independents across all sectors and at all levels of the UK music industry. Uplifting, supporting and connecting young people, particularly women and empowering fellow black execs is an integral part of Komali’s brand. With a desire to keep pushing our culture to higher heights, Komali believes starting with future game changers, trailblazers and tastemakers is the key to this.

Komali is regularly requested as a guest speaker on a variety of events and panels domestically and internationally for the likes of the BBC, Sound City, PRS and By:Larm. Her debut book will be published in 2026.