Anita Anand presents the internationally acclaimed Empire podcast with William Dalrymple which has over 55 million downloads to date. She is an award-winning radio and television journalist. She is the author of Sophia – Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary and The Patient Assassin (winner of the Penn Hessell Tiltman Award for History Book of The Year) as well as co-authoring Koh-I-Noor with … Read More

Andrei Soldatov is a Russian investigative journalist in exile. He is co-founder and editor of Agentura ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities, and has been covering security services and terrorism issues since 1999. He is co-author with Irina Borogan of The New Nobility, The Red Web, and The Compatriots. Their new book Our Dear Friends in Moscow … Read More

Alice Oswald studied Classics at Oxford and then trained as a gardener. She worked in gardens for seven years before publishing her first book of poems, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, which won the Forward Prize in 1996. She won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2002. Weeds and Wildflowers won the Ted Hughes award, A Sleepwalk on the Severn … Read More

Alan Bradley is a multi-award-winning Irish director. In 2024, he won the Young Director Award for Documentary at Cannes In 2023, Alan directed and produced the ground breaking film ‘Patrick: A Young Traveller Lost’ highlighting the crisis of the alarmingly high suicide rates in the Irish Traveller community. Last year he directed and produced ‘STALKED’ for VMTV, ‘Anorexia My Family … Read More

Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974. Her first two novels appeared in English were Touch (tr. Paula Haydar, 2010) and We Are All Equally Far From Love (tr. Paul Starkey, 2012). She was awarded the Young Writer’s Award by the A. M. Qattan Foundation in 2002 and 2004. Minor Detail was shortlisted for the National Book Award for … Read More

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021, the first Black African in 35 years. Published in 44 languages, he is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Admiring Silence, By the Sea, Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), The Last Gift, Gravel Heart and … Read More

William Sieghart has spent most of his adult life promoting poetry and its powers. He founded the Forward Prizes for Poetry and National Poetry Day which is celebrated in the UK every October. William has been dispensing poetry prescriptions since his Poetry Pharmacy began in 2014 listening to thousands of people’s problems and prescribing them a poetic remedy. He has … Read More

Dylan Moran is a comedian, actor and writer who in 1996 won the Perrier Award, at the Edinburgh Fringe. Black Books, the Channel 4 hit sitcom that he co-wrote and starred-in, won him two BAFTAs, and he has since won numerous prizes and accolades for his television work and live-shows. Moran merges two strands of stand-up: sharp observational humor, and … Read More

Colin Greenwood is the bassist of Radiohead. He reviews non-fiction for The Spectator. In 2024, he published a book of his photographs How To Disappear – A Portrait of Radiohead Greenwood read English at Cambridge before Radiohead’s international hit ‘Creep’ was released, from the album The Bends, before releasing OK Computer. Their reinvention at the turn of the millennium with … Read More

Carole Cadwalladr is a renowned journalist for the Guardian, and Cambridge Analytica investigator. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2019, receiving praise for her investigation and coverage into Cambridge Analytica and its role in Brexit. Her sheer dedication in exposing a nexus of corruption that resulted in Mark Zuckerberg being called before Congress. She formerly worked at The Observer … Read More