Gerry Takamura is a Biographer and Historian, originally from Norfolk, she lived in Japan before returning to the UK and now makes Oxfordshire her home. She is interested in the lives of western women married to Japanese men in the 19th and 20th century and who made Japan home. These pioneering women often adapted to a very different culture as well as having to deal with challenging experiences. Recently she has been researching those wives such as Gwen Terasaki and Rita Takesuru who lived in Japan during World War II. Her hope is to find and research other women who had similar experiences.

Moira Taylor published her first (group) biography in May 2019 – Sailors, Settlers & Sinners: The Hall Family in Hull and New Zealand, 1795-1907.  She was briefly a reporter on the Christchurch Star before coming to England on a post-graduate travel scholarship from the University of Canterbury and worked for a time with the New Zealand Press Association when Britain was negotiating its membership of the then European Economic Community. She recorded interviews for a radio documentary with intimates of the New Zealand-born author, Katherine Mansfield, including one with Mansfield’s companion and friend, Ida Baker, which was recently rebroadcast as part of New Zealand’s KM130 commemoration celebrations. She is contributing to the forthcoming Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield from Edinburgh University Press (eds Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber). In 1995 she was appointed the first Textbook Development Editor for the UK academic publisher Routledge and remained a Senior Development Editor with its parent company, Taylor & Francis, until 2011. From 2013-2016 she was Secretary of the New Zealand Studies Network in London Sailors, Settlers & Sinners, is her first book.

I enjoy doing unusual things with Biography. My latest biography is of a character who has never lived – and therefore can never die. She’s the woman who gets into men’s clothes to talk about love, Rosalind: Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine (Oberon Books, UK 2016 and Pegasus Books, USA 2017). My two previous biographies focus on people in the real world. William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis (Yale, 2003) treats thematically the tensions in a Pre-Raphaelite marriage. Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown (Chatto, 2010) views the painter through the lenses of two wives and two secret loves. Earlier I edited The Folio Anthology of Autobiography (1994).  I’m now researching the biography of an Italian family who fled Turin for Cambridge in 1922 to fight Fascism, bringing with them an emblematic version of Raphael’s luminous Madonna of the Candelabra.