A regular contributor to the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, Andre Aciman was born in Alexandria: raised in Egypt, Italy, and France; and educated at Harvard. He teaches literature at Bard College and lives in Manhattan.
Rita Mae Brown was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, on November 28, 1944. She received an associate's degree from Broward Junior College in 1965, a B.A. in English and classics from New York University in 1968, a Cinematography Degree from the School of the Visual Arts in 1968, and a Ph.D. in English and political science from the Institute for Policy Studies in 1976. She was the writer-in-residence at the Women's Writing Center of Cazenovi College and a visiting instructor teaching fiction writing at the University of Virginia. After publishing two books of poetry, she published her first novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, in 1973. Her works include The Hand that Cradles the Rock, Sudden Death, Venus… Envy, Loose Lips, and Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser. She writes the Mrs. Murphy Mystery series and Foxhunting Mysteries series. She also writes screenplays and teleplays including Sweet Surrender, Room to Move, Table Dancing, and The Long Hot Summer. Her work on TV earned several Emmy nominations and she received the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Variety Show in 1982 for I Love Liberty.
Sue Perkin and Giles Coren are a familiar TV team, first appearing together in Edwardian Supersize Me in 2007 followed by The Supersizers Go. in 2008, where they ate the diets from various historical periods, including WWII rations, then monitored the impact each diet had on their bodies. They returned in 2009 with The Supersizers Eat. sampling the foods of ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the French revoluntion and Twenties. When not eating weird and wonderful historical delicacies with Giles, Sue is a comedian, radio and television presenter, actress, and writer. She has appeared on a range of popular TV panel and entertainment shows, winning BBC talent show Maestro in 2008, culminating in… her conducting of three pieces at Proms in the Park. Giles is a restaurant critic, newspaper columnist for The Times and Sunday Times and author. He has also presented a number of programmes, including 2006 documentary Taxing the Fat about the costs of obesity for the NHS. He became a familiar TV face after he regularly appeared as a correspondant on Gordan Ramsey's The F-Word in 2005.