Emmanuel Iduma [2024, pictured above] is an acclaimed Nigerian novelist. He published his first book, Farad, in 2012. In 2018 he published A Stranger’s Pose, a book which is described as a unique blend of travelogue, photographs and poetry. The book did well critically and was longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize.  

His most recent novel is I am still with you which retraces the steps of his uncle, who disappeared in the Biafran War. Emmanuel, who received the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize in 2022, has also taught literature in the US and UK and he has also been an important voice in African literature, having co-founded Saraba in Nigeria in 2009, a literary magazine which aims “to create unending voices by publishing the finest emerging writers, with a focus on writers from Nigeria, and other parts of Africa”. It has become one of the most successful literary magazines in and out of Africa. 

Emmanuel, who is doing a PhD in Digital Humanities, worked on it for 10 years and says it published hundreds of new writers.  Emmanuel’s partner the award-winning novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ is also about to start a PhD in Digital Humanities as a Gates Cambridge Scholar this autumn.

Memoir

Some Scholars have become best-selling memoirists, for instance, Tara Westover [2009, pictured above], whose best-selling book Educated charts her experiences growing up in rural Idaho, raised by a radical, survivalist father who was intensely paranoid about government interference in the lives of his family. The book, which also talks about her time as a Gates Cambridge Scholar at Cambridge, was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the L.A. Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and the American Booksellers Association voted Educated the Nonfiction Book of the Year. In 2019, Time Magazine named Westover one of the 100 Most Influential People.  In 2023, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden. 

Rob Henderson’s book Troubled is about his journey from foster care to the military to academia and explores questions about social class, status, education and ‘luxury beliefs’ – the beliefs of middle class elites which, he says, often have a damaging impact on those who are less socially advantaged when put into practice. The book has recently been optioned for a feature film.

Rob [2018] is currently a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor at City Journal. He is also a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The Times, and has written for the New York Times, The Free Press and The Boston Globe, among other outlets as well as appearing on numerous podcasts.

Factual books

Many Scholars have written factual books, often based on their research. These have been both academic publications and more mainstream publications. In some cases they have reached the bestseller lists. This is just a selection of some of them.

Ayala Panievsky [2018] is a researcher and former journalist specialising in populism, media under attack, and democratic backsliding at City, St George’s University of London. Her first book, The New Censorship, focuses on the unfortunate and unexpected mechanisms through which today’s media has inadvertently amplified the anti-democratic movement that looms over our societies. Her research has won attention from leading journalists and thinkers around the world. Ayala works with newsrooms worldwide to improve the future of news and what we get to know in times of sophisticated threats to democracy. 

Stephen Lezak [2019] has a PhD in Polar Studies and is about to publish his book The Longest Night, Coming Home in the Age of Apocalypse. Published by Atria Books, it takes the long view on the climate crisis, weaving together historical and present-day realities for the indigenous communities of rural Alaska, who are already living in the future of a changing planet. Alongside his writing, including for various broadsheet newspapers, Stephen has advised two US presidential campaigns on climate policy and acted as an expert reviewer for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Ben Weissenbach [2023], also doing a PhD in Polar Studies,  is author of North to the Future, an offline adventure through the changing wilds of Alaska. It was published last year by Grand Central Publishing and was named one of the 10 best science books of 2025 by Smithsonian Magazine.

Ben and Stephen spoke together recently on the Gates Cambridge podcast, So, now what? about their work.

Two other Scholars who have recently appeared at a Gates Cambridge event together are Devani Singh and Marc Mierowsky. 

Marc’s book, A Spy Amongst Us, recounts the story of how English writer Daniel Defoe became a government agent for England in the early 18^th century as Scottish people protested plans for union with England.

Marc [2011] is an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow and Lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne, where he researches 17th-and 18th-century literature and intellectual history. He is an associate editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe and coeditor of Oxford World Classic’s edition of Roxana: the Fortunate Mistress.

Devani’s book,  Chaucer’s Early Modern Readers: Reception in Print and Manuscript, is the first extended study of the reception of Chaucer’s medieval manuscripts in the early modern period offers a fascinating historical precedent for how the move from traditional to digital books can accommodate the new while revitalising the old. The book is an offshoot of Devani’s PhD on Chaucer’s early modern reception in print. 

Devani [2011] is currently leading a project on literary history at the University of Geneva, studying the history of prologues and prefaces which started to appear in print in the late 15th century.  

Other Scholars have who have published books related to their research include:

Anna Malaika Tubbs [2017, pictured above] who has published two best-selling books on the history of Black women. Erased: What American patriarchy has hidden from us is described as “the story of the United States from a new perspective: one where the people who shaped this country – who have been oppressed and whose contributions have been denied – are at the centre, reminding us that we can restore what has been strategically kept from us”. It follows on the heels of The Three Mothers, based on her PhD, which celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America’s most well-known figures: Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and James Baldwin.  

Ayan Mandal whose book A Stethoscope for the Brain: Preventive Approaches to Protect the Mind aims to explain in an accessible way why brain diseases are so difficult to treat and what research is being done to learn how to better manage these conditions. Neuroscientist Ayan [2018] wrote his Cambridge PhD thesis on network neuroscience and brain tumours. His research has been presented at several national and international conferences and published in multiple peer-reviewed journals. His decision to write the book stems from his interest in both writing and science communication.

Eric Cervini, an award-winning author, producer and historian of LGBTQ+ politics. His first book, The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Eric [2015] is the Emmy-winning creator and Executive Producer of The Book of Queer, a queer history docu-series boasting the largest all-queer cast in Hollywood history. In March 2024, Cervini launched Allstora, an online book marketplace, and he is currently Allstora’s CEO. On the site, Cervini also hosts Eric’s (Very Gay) Book Club, where he highlights his pick of the best gay literature.

Sagnik Dutta [2016] whose recently published book, In the shadow of minority rights, charts a new way of understanding minority rights based on an exploration of the everyday life of Muslim women’s activism in Mumbai. ‘In the Shadow of minority rights’ challenges abstract liberal approaches to minority rights and colonial constructions of the minority and shows how women deploy everyday ideas of ethics and bodily practices to challenge inequality in Muslim family law.

Marcel Elias whose research focuses on the literary and cultural history of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. His first book, English Literature and the Crusades, focuses on the Middle English crusade romances that proliferated between the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) and the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453). His second, How the Muslim Counter-Crusading Movement Shaped European Culture, will be a new cultural history of premodern Europe. Marcel [2013 - https://www.gatescambridge.org/biography/6597/] did his PhD in English.

Author and illustrator Ere Derbez [the illustrations above are by Ere] whose book,  No son micro. Machismos Cotidianos [They are not micro. Everyday machismo], written with Claudia de la Garza, is about everyday microaggressions against women. Initially, Ere was asked to illustrate it and then, because of her academic background, to write it. It went on to win a prestigious award and become a bestseller in Mexico.

Ere [2025], who is doing a PhD on how public art can be used to change the narrative about violence and its victims in Mexico, has since published Inés Amor y los primeros años de la Galería de Arte and Mapas Corporales which addresses racism, transphobia, misogyny and ableism through the history of science and art. She has just published a book of cartoons, Dibujo por no llorar, with Hachette.   

Renewable energy expert Nij Lal [2008] who has furthered the science outreach he did at Cambridge by presenting a host of children’s science programmes in Australia, including ABC Kids’ Imagine This and authoring the children’s book, Henry the flying emu. His new illustrated book Behind the screens: How the internet works and how to make it work for you aims to help people aged 9-13 “be online in the best way possible”. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University’s  Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems. 

Tyler Goodspeed [2008] who spoke recently to Scholars about his new book, Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It. Tyler, who is a Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and the Chief Economist at ExxonMobil, has won acclaim for his analysis, with the Financial Times recently recommending it in their summer reads in Economics.  

Journalism

Several Scholars are or have been journalists, beginning with David Haskell [2011] from the first cohort, who has been editor-in-chief of New York magazine since 2019. In his first year as editor-in-chief, New York was named Hottest Magazine of the Year by Adweek and in 2021, he was named Adweek’s Publishing Editor of the Year. New York won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Cover of the Year contest in 2020 for a cover on Donald Trump’s potential impeachment.

Lizzie Presser [2014] is a journalist at ProPublica writing on health and social policy. She was previously a contributing writer for The California Sunday Magazine, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, This American Life,  Harper's and elsewhere. With three colleagues, her work uncovering the deadly consequences of abortion bans won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2025. Her stories on diabetic complications won the National Magazine Award for Public Service in 2021. “The Dispossessed” won a George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting in 2020.

Juliet Lapidos [2005] is the Ideas editor at the Atlantic. She was previously the op-ed and Sunday opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times and a staff editor at the New York Times. She is also the author of the novel Talent, published by Little, Brown in the United States, Borough Press in the United Kingdom, and Bompiani in Italy which is described as “a sly and playful unpacking of the cult of the artist that excoriates academia with devilish glee”. 

Reetika Subramanian [2019] was a journalist before she began her PhD and she has brought a journalistic lens to her research on gender violence and the climate crisis, creating Climate Brides, a multimedia project and podcast investigating how climate change is deepening the drivers of child marriage in South Asia to get the issues she is addressing out to a wider audience. Reetika, who is part of the BBC 2025 New Generation Thinkers cohort and was a Bill Gates Sr. Prize winner,  has also co-created an acclaimed comic book, ‘Raindrop in the Drought’ on the life and work of Godavari Dange, a farmer and feminist leader in the drought-affected Marathwada region which has been accessed by local farmer collectives, women’s groups and government-run schools. 

Mona Jebril [2012], an Impact Prize winner,  also produces her own podcast - A Life Lived in Conflict - in which she interviews a broad span of people from conflict zones ranging from Gaza to Afghanistan and from entrepreneurs to students. She has also experimented with other artistic forms, including animation, playwriting and poetry to get her research ideas across to a broader public. Her PhD explored the multiple ways occupation and conflict in the Middle East have affected the mobility of academics in Gaza, their academic freedom and attempts to reform the higher education system. Mona, who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines, was recently awarded a British Academy Global Innovation Fellowship to work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Emily Kassie is a journalist and filmmaker whose most recent film, Sugarcane, has won multiple awards, including the US Documentary Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Oscar. The film, a devastating investigation into systematic abuse at an Indian residential school in Canada, has been streamed on Disney + and Hulu. In addition to co-directing the film, Emily [2016], who did her master’s in International Relations at the University of Cambridge and won a Gates Cambridge Impact Prize, served as a producer and cinematographer.

Emily’s background is as a journalist covering geopolitical conflict, humanitarian crises, corruption and the stories of people caught in the crossfire. Her credits include directing on Netflix’s Explained series, films and visual investigations for The New York Times, PBS Frontline and The Guardian, among others. Her first documentary I Married My Family’s Killer, on intermarriage in post-genocide Rwanda, won the Student Academy Award in 2015.