People

Gayle Letherby is a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Plymouth, Greenwich and Bath. As a sociologist, her interests are varied and include reproductive and non/parental identities; meanings and experiences of love; solitude and/or loneliness, gender, health and wellbeing; loss and the aftermath of death; travel and transport mobility; teaching and learning in higher education, and gender and identity. She has always been fascinated by anything methodological, including auto/biographical, feminist and creative practices.

She has written several fictional stories relating to topics in sociology. She regularly embeds fiction (and memoir) in academic publications and has contributed to the fictional section of The Sociological Review magazine. 

Kara Gnodde was born in Johannesburg and raised on a diet of Dr Seuss and no TV. She studied mathematics as part of her Business Science degree at the University of Cape Town, following which she joined Saatchis in London as a strategic planner. She lived in Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore before settling back in the UK with her husband and three children. 

Hearing a discussion on the radio about a maths problem that could change the world gave her a place to start The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything, her debut novel, Mantle (Pan Macmillan)’s lead fiction debut of spring 2023. The US edition (HarperCollins) was a Barnes & Noble monthly fiction pick.

Mason Pember is a lecturer in the Mathematical Sciences department at the University of Bath. His research lies in the field of Differential Geometry and he has held postdocs in Kobe, Vienna and Turin. He became a Fellow of the Higher Education Authority in 2024. 

He has been lecturing Group Theory since 2022, coinciding with his revived interest in fictional literature. This inspired the TDF project Fictional narratives as a learning aid in mathematics.