John Banville is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, the 2005 Booker Prize-winning The Sea, and, more recently, the bestselling Strafford and Quirke crime series, which has twice been shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger.

Lara Marlowe is a US-born journalist and author. She was a staff foreign correspondent for The Irish Times from 1996 until 2023. Marlowe has won four press awards and completed three reporting stints in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion in 2022 and continues to write a column for The Irish Times. Her most recent publication is How Good It Is … Read More

Donal Ryan has published seven number one-bestselling novels, winning several awards for his fiction. He was nominated for the Booker Prize for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and for From A Low and Quiet Sea which was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016. In 2021 he became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet … Read More

Fintan O’Toole is one of the foremost social and political commentators of his generation, a columnist with The Irish Times, and advising editor of the New York Review of Books. His most recent book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland since 1958 was named as Book of the Year in Ireland and as one of the ten … Read More

Rivka Galchen is an award-winning novelist and a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of five books: Atmospheric Disturbances, American Innovations, Little Labors, Rat Rule 79, and Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch.

Joseph O’Neill lives in New York and teaches at Bard College. He is the author of five novels, Godwin being the most recent (paperback this month). Prior to that: Netherland (Booker Prize longlist), The Dog (Booker Prize longlist), This Is the Life and The Breezes, as well as a memoir, Blood-Dark Track. His short stories have been published in the … Read More

William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians, and the bestselling author of the White Mughals and The Last Mughal. His latest book The Golden Road was an instant Sunday Times bestseller. He has written and presented three television series and co-hosts the podcast ‘Empire’ with Anita Anand. He writes regularly for the New Yorker and The Guardian.

Geoff Dyer’s many books include But Beautiful (about jazz), The Ongoing Moment and See/Saw (about photography), Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (one of his four novels) and The Last Days of Roger Federer (hardly about tennis at all). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. … Read More

Ben Anderson has been reporting on war for over two decades, making groundbreaking films on the conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Congo, amongst many others. He began his career spending over four years as an undercover reporter; producing exposés on corruption in the funeral business, abuse of the mentally ill in care homes, the civil war in Burma … Read More

Misha Glenny is the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. During the revolutions in Eastern Europe of 1989 and the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Misha was the BBC’s Central Europe Correspondent. His latest podcasts The Scramble for Rare Earths and The Invention of Russia are among the most listened to on BBC Sounds. His books … Read More