International bestselling historian, broadcaster and screenwriter. Her latest book, Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2022 and was a Book of the Year in The Economist and the New Statesman. In 2017, she made her feature film debut with Churchill, starring Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson. She writes History’s Secret Heroes on BBC Radio 4, presented by Helena Bonham Carter, and in 2024 wrote and presented the ten-part documentary The Lucan Obsession, also on Radio 4. Her roots are in the Baltic, but her family was exiled from the Russian Empire after a fight with Tsar Nicholas I, and had to flee to the furthest possible place: New Zealand.

Author and journalist at the Guardian newspaper. She is from Sudan, a country that is at the intersection of North Arab Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. A fact that means she grew up feeling too black to be Arab and too Arab to be African. To complicate that identity further she recently acquired British citizenship, and now splits her time between London and North and East Africa. Her debut non-fiction book We Need New Stories (2019 - UK, 2021 - US), was a Paris Review and Prospect magazine book of the year.

Writer, editor, literary agent and publisher. She was the fourth person to join Virago Press in the ‘70s. As agent she represented Deborah Levy, Ali Smith, Maggie O’Farrell, Amanda Foreman and others. She was editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury Publishing for more than two decades, working with bestselling authors Khaled Hosseini, Donna Tartt and Elizabeth Gilbert; Women’s Prize winners Ann Patchett, Madeline Miller, Kamila Shamsie and Susanna Clarke; Booker Prize winners George Saunders and Margaret Atwood, and Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah. She comes from the Afriats, an ancient family of Berber Jewish traders whose caravans travelled from Timbuktu to Mogador. The Silk Road Slippers logo is her family trademark from the ‘20s. She is writing a memoir, Caravan, to be published by Canongate in the UK and Simon & Schuster in the US. She is Visiting Professor at the Centre for Fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Former Consulting Editor at Bloomsbury UK and currently a freelance editor working with publishing houses and individuals. She is also a consultant working with institutions such as the National Museum of Sweden, the Ubersee Museum in Bremen and the Basel Academy of Arts and Design on the art of storytelling for changing audiences. This year, she is one of 20 international mentors working with the German Federal Fund to help arts practitioners develop their creative process. Born to a diplomat father in London, Faiza hails from a line of women rulers in the Indian state of Bhopal and is as such an underachiever.