Saskia van der Zee is a crime writer inspired by the rugged beauty of the Shropshire Hills, a passion first sparked by the adventure books of her childhood. She holds a degree in Medieval History from the University of Oxford and an MA in Creative Writing.

Across an eclectic career as a teacher, voice coach, and equine massage therapist, books have always been her first love. She wrote her first novel for her children — now long grown-up — in a yellow camper van parked at the bottom of Ashes Hollow on the Long Mynd.

When she is not writing, Saskia can be found exploring the hills with her partner or reading in front of a log fire. She lives in Shropshire, juggling her writing with caring for a menagerie of horses, dogs and cats.

She is the author of the DI Georgie Fraser series, set in the iconic Shropshire Hills National Landscape and published by her own Dove Cottage Press. The latest in series, Bones of Caer Caradoc, was released on 29th September.

My interest in the Mind-Body problem was inspired by reading Daniel Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained”. He proposes that qualitative experiences, such as a feeling of pain, do not exist. Although it /seems/ that we have this phenomenology, we do not actually do so. He also denies that we have conscious agency. I find these claims absurd, but his book made me realise that any explanation of mind in terms of physics must be extremely difficult.

I wrote a draft manuscript on /panpsychism/, which is the position that mind exists – in extremely primitive form – everywhere in the universe. I completed an MA degree at the University of Reading, writing my thesis on the Mind-Body problem, and used it to improve my manuscript, which was published as ‘Panpsychism’, 2011.

In my 2022 book, ‘Mind, Quantum, and Free Will’, my ideas are closely bound to contemporary physics. This gives my ideas credibility. Part II discusses science. Particular attention is paid to quantum theory, where I go back to the original papers of Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohr, and others, where they debate entanglement. I argue that Einstein made many significant contributions to this theory.

Over the years I’ve given talks and other presentations at international conferences. Please visit my table, N34, if you would like to discuss science, philosophy, or the Mind-Body problem, from any point of view. Your ideas and insights are most welcome.

Peter Fockema is an unapologetic history enthusiast who founded Blancart Press in 2026 as an engine through which to put historical fiction into print.

His debut novel, The Uncrowned Lion, is a historical political thriller set in the treacherous heart of fourteenth-century medieval England.

“Gentlemen, the inheritance of England is to play for.

England, 1376. The aging king, once the terror of the French, has lost his ability to govern and finds himself hidden from sight to live out his final years as a shameful secret. His son and heir, the famed Black Prince who was once England’s pride, is also at death’s door. The death of both the monarch and his heir would leave behind a ten-year old boy to be king – albeit a puppet one on strings.

The king’s other son, the Duke of Lancaster, is charged with running England whilst his father and brother wither – a task he has failed at abysmally. The kingdom’s borders lie undefended and enemy forces raid up and down the bankrupt country. Succumbing to his own avarice, the duke and his friends descend like crows upon a corpse to feast on the still-breathing body of England. Reeling from the fallout, Alfonse and his father, Henry Penenden, find themselves teetering on the edge of ruin. Enraged, they join a camp that’s filled with lords, bishops, and merchants that are all opposed to the Duke of Lancaster who seems determined to swallow England whole.”

Steve Sheppard was born and grew up in Surrey before moving to Buckinghamshire and then to Oxfordshire, where he spent a quarter of a century living in an idiosyncratic village that was the affectionate inspiration for his fourth book, Lazytown. He now lives in Hampshire. He spent forty years starting to write books but not finishing them, until belatedly realising that the key is not to give up. The other thing he has since learned is that he should have become a celebrity before writing a book, as this would have made selling it much easier.

False Connections, Steve’s fifth book, was published in June and is the first to be written as a straight thriller and not primarily as a comedy although, don’t worry, there’s still quite a lot of humour in it. He hopes it will be the first of a series featuring feisty, funny but flawed ex-MI5 agent, Mel Milano. He also has three spy thrillers with laughs to his name, all published by Claret Press: A Very Important Teapot (2019), set in Australia, Bored to Death in the Baltics (2021), not set in Australia, and Poor Table Manners (2024), which takes place in Cape Town. These feature an initially fairly hapless hero, Dawson, and a considerably less hapless heroine, Lucy, together with varied supporting casts, most of whom are not who they claim to be. Steve’s fourth book (as mentioned above) is an out-and-out comedy-murder-mystery, Lazytown (2025).

I am an author of fiction – literary/commercial/book group fiction that is character driven and I have written four novels with the fifth soon to be published. After a career as a short story writer for women’s magazines, I completed an M.A. in Creative Writing and began to write full length fiction. I am also a tutor and speaker on all things bookish, writerly and readerly!

Vanya Bagaev (Vanechka) is a Russian-British writer and translator, and founder of the samizdat press nova·nevédoma (nova-nevedoma.com). His most recent novels are Tulubaikaporia (2026), about a vanishing Russian village and the people trying to escape it or return to it, and Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel (2024), a dystopian satire and psychological horror about a fictional reflection of contemporary Russia. Vanya’s work has been shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Short Fiction and has appeared in the Republic of Letters, Apocrypha, SUM FLUX and Soaring Twenties, among other places.