One Day in the City

William Woodard "Will" Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English journalist, novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time. He has also appeared on the comedy panel show Have I Got News for You, though he has since declared that he will not make any further appearances on the show.

A.S. Byatt is renowned internationally for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. The Children’s Book was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2009 and her most recent book is Ragnorak (2011). Her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A.S. Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

Alan Hollinghurst was born in Gloucestershire in 1954. He read English at Oxford and taught for one term at UCL before joining the staff of the TLS, where he was Deputy Editor from 1990 to 1995. He is the author of 5 novels, including The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Line of Beauty (winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize) and The Stranger's Child (2011). He has also translated Racine's Bajazet for the Almeida Theatre and Bérénice for the Donmar Theatre in London. In 2006 he gave the Lord Northcliffe Lectures at UCL. He lives in London.

Salena Godden's latest collection 'Under The Pier' was published by hip-indie imprint Nasty Little Press in 2011. Most recently her work has appeared in Shortfire Press, Illustrated Ape Magazine, Trespass Magazine, Paraphilia, Rising, Teller Magazine, 'The Mechanics Institute Review' published by Birkbeck University, Picador's 'Punk Fiction' and Parthian Books 'Raconteur'. 

Iain Sinclair is a writer, filmmaker and ‘psychogeographer’ whose work and documentation of the borough of Hackney is unrivalled.

Hilary Powell is an artist and is currently AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL working on a three-year project critiquing the utopian narratives of the Games through the appropriation of the traditional techniques of pop-up book production and etching alongside a  ‘residency’ on a demolition site.

Isaac Marrero is post-doctoral research fellow at Birkbeck undertaking a two-year project entitled ‘The Militant City’ investigating the role of art in the configuration of spaces of dissent in relation to the Olympic mega-event.

Alex Preston is the award-winning author of *This Bleeding City* and *The Revelations *(Faber & Faber). His work has been published in twelve languages and his novels have been best-sellers in the UK, Italy and China. He is a journalist and critic and appears regularly on the BBC Review Show.

Michael Stewart is the founder of Open City Docs at UCL which produces both Open City Docs Fest (2nd edition, June 21-24 this year) and the MyStreet project. He teaches anthropology at UCL, promoting the use of documentary film as a means to see the world differently, encouraging students and others to understand why documentary matters and to think about how it can be used.

Anna Brownsted is a theatre director and designer of interactive performance events. Her company, Unclaimed Creatures, has produced work at the Roundhouse, Old Vic Tunnels, Battersea Arts Center, British Museum, and for the Forest Fringe Traveling Sounds Library. Anna is currently a PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama, where her practice-as-research focuses on heterotopic spaces of deviation and performance structures that ‘produce’ the participant as a protagonist.

Chris Petit is a writer and filmmaker whose novels include Robinson and The Passenger and whose films include Radio On. He is curator of various projects which may or may not exist, including The Perimeter Fence and The Museum of Loneliness. He has written or made films about air stewardesses, weather, JG Ballard and CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton. He is a frequent collaborator with Iain Sinclair and they have made several feature-length films together including Asylum and London Orbital.

Nick Shepley is the organiser of UCL's first-ever Festival of London and Literature: One Day in the City, and a Teaching Fellow in Modern British and American Literature in the English Department at UCL. The idea of "One Day in the City" sprang from Nick's current research on the one-day or circadian novel and its relationship with the city.

Sophie Hoyle is a writer and artist living and working in London, with a background in Human Geography (UCL), and postgraduate Fine Art (CSM, UAL). Hoyle’s interests span a range of aspects of urban living from individual phenomenological experiences of the urban landscape, to wider socio-political issues of the built environment. She has been involved with a range of organisations that approach the city and debate its issues (TINAG: Soapbox, Art & Architecture, Archway Investigations and Response, Silent City), and has taught with Diego Ferrari on the Photography, Art and Architecture course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Chris is currently studying for a D.Phil at Oxford University on the subject of Financial Crisis in English and American Literature. Prior to this he obtained a BSc. in Economics from the London School of Economics and an MA in English Literature from Birkbeck College. He also spent several years working in financial services prior to his return to academia.

Doris Bremm is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute

of Technology. She is currently finishing her first book Representation Beyond Representation: Reading Paintings in Contemporary Narratives that considers contemporary literature about visual art as a new way to historicize postmodernism and the postmodern novel. Her essay “London's Museum Spaces in the Works of A.S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd” will be included in a collection entitled Beyond the City: The Return of the ‘Real London’ in Contemporary British Fiction forthcoming from Continuum in 2012. In 2011, she served as a Lead Investigator for a Level 1 NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant on Space and Place in the Humanities: Teaching with Maps and Mapping Technologies.

Kasia Boddy teaches in the Department of English at UCL. Her book Geranium, a cultural history of one of the world's most popular flowers, will be published by Reaktion Books in September.

Daljit Nagra comes from a Punjabi background. He was born and raised in London then Sheffield. He has won several prestigious prizes for his poetry. In 2004, he won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem with Look We Have Coming to Dover! This was also the title of his first collection which was published by Faber & Faber in 2007. This won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and The South Bank Show Decibel Award, and was nominated for The Costa Prize, The Guardian First Book Prize, the Aldeburgh Prize and the Glen Dimplex Award.

Dr Hope Wolf is a Teaching Fellow in Life Writing at King's College London. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century and contemporary life writing and literature. After taking her BA and MPhil degrees at Cambridge University, she began researching at the Imperial War Museum, funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award. After completing her doctorate she held a Graduate Fellowship at the Human Rights Consortium, working on a Mellon Sawyer project, 'Fratricide and Fraternité: Understanding and Repairing Neighborly Violence.' From August 2010 she worked as the Lead Researcher on Strandlines: a community engagement project based at the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London.

Kyran Joughin lectures in Film and Critical Practice at the University of the Arts London. She serves on panels at several international film festivals and she served time working at Compendium bookshop in CamdenTown many years ago. She lives in London and France.

Ali Mangera is founder partner of the London-Barcelona based architectural practice Mangera Yvars Architects. Mangera Yvars is currently working on projects for Qatar University, The Salaam Centre, North Harrow and designed the experimental (unbuilt) mosque at Abbey Mills.

Amy is a PhD student at the Bartlett School of Architecture in the department of History and Theory. Her research addresses the impact of financial flows on the built environment with a particular focus on the City of London and its position within the offshore and imperial networks. She holds an MA in Architectural History from the Bartlett and an undergraduate degree in History of Art from the University of Edinburgh. Amy is funded by the Schools Competition Act Settlement Trust (SCAST) Postgraduate Research Scholarship.

Rebecca Ross is an academic researcher and graphic designer with interests in urbanism, interaction, and media. She recently completed her PhD Candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her thesis, "All Above: Visual Culture and the Professionalization of City Planning, 1867-1933," considers interactions between broad cultural enthusiasms for viewing the city from above—manifest in forms such as tethered hot air balloons, bird's eye views, observatories—and visual practices associated with installation of urban planning as a new and enduring professional category. Rebecca also teaches graphic and interaction design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

I am a Londoner born & bred, from generations of Londoners. I'm an interdisciplinary historian, with an interest in architecture, medicine, and London life and literature. I have written several books: *Death Dissection & the Destitute* (Chicago University Press, 2000); *Vintage Papers from The Lancet* (Elsevier, 2006); *The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy*(Oxford University Press, 2008) and *Dickens & the Workhouse* (Oxford University Press, 2012).

John Timberlake (b. Lancashire, 1967) is a London based artist whose combinations of drawing, painting and photography reflect a longstanding engagement with landscape and the science fiction imaginary. He is an alumnus of Brighton Polytechnic and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Exhibitions include the international surveys Beyond the Picturesque (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent), and Pittoresk (MARTa, Herford, Westfalen, Germany) both 2009; Breakthrough: Works from the Collection at the Imperial War Museum (2009 – 2010) and After London, a collaboration with art historian Dr Joy Sleeman (Slade/UCL) at The Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, 4/3-2/4/2011. Exhibitions in 2012 have included 'Ron Haselden / John Timberlake' at Galerie des Petits Carreaux, Paris, and the group exhibition 'Dark Sky' curated by Geoffrey Batchen and Christine Barton, at Te Pataka Toi Adam Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand. Timberlake's book Bussard Ramjet, an illustrated fiction, was published by Artwords/Artis Den Bosch in 2009.

Joy Sleeman is Head of Taught Courses in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her research embraces aspects of the histories of sculpture and landscape and these two areas of interest coalesce in work on the new forms of landscape art that emerged in the 1960s, often referred to as 'Land Art'. Her publications related to this area include: ‘"Like two guys discovering Neptune": transatlantic dialogues in the emergence of Land Art’ (Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945 – 1975, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011) and ‘Land Art and the Moon Landing’ (Journal of Visual Culture 8.3, 2009). She is currently co-curating an exhibition of Land Art in Britain, with the Arts Council Collection and Hayward Touring.