Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at UCL. She is the author of Narrative in the Age of the Genome, alongside essays on science, literature, and colonialism. Outside academia, she worked as a journalist for the Statesman newspaper in Kolkata, reporting on issues to do with development, health, and climate.
Alexandra Harris is a literary critic, cultural historian, and Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Romantic Moderns, Virginia Woolf, and Weatherland; The Rising Down will be published in 2024. She reviews fiction for the Guardian and chaired the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2020.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is an award-winning journalist who has written for the The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Evening Standard, and The Mail among others and was a weekly columnist on The Independent for eighteen years. She is now a weekly columnist for I news and was shortlisted in this year’s Society of Editor’s columnist of the year award. She was the first regular columnist of colour on a national newspaper in the UK and the first female Muslim. She campaigns against forced marriages, female genital mutilation and for the rights of women and girls around the world. She has authored several books. The most recent one is Ladies Who Punch – fifty stories of incredibly women, past and present. In 2001 she was awarded an MBE for services to journalism, a medal she returned two years later, as a protest against the war in Iraq. Yasmin won The Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2002.
Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman. He has also written for the Times and the Sunday Times. He is the author of the forthcoming book This is Not America.
Julia Jordan is Associate Professor of 20th Century English Literature at UCL, where she teaches modern and contemporary literature. She has edited the work of B. S. Johnson, and has published two books and several essays, mostly about experimental literature and late modernist fiction. She is currently working on a new project, which largely about trees and what happens to the pastoral mode in twentieth-century literature.
Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor and writer who was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature over the course of a career. He currently writes on books and arts for international media including The Economist, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement and UnHerd, and was formerly Literary Editor and Senior Writer at The Independent. He chaired the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and then served as the prize’s Special Adviser. His reader’s guide to global fiction, The 100 Best Novels in Translation, is published by Galileo.
Alison Flood is comment and culture editor at the New Scientist. She is also the Observer’s thriller reviewer, and reads far too much science fiction and crime. She has judged book awards including the McIlvanney prize for the best Scottish crime novel of the year, and the British Book Awards.
Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University, runs the Texte und Töne publishing imprint, and is the author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined A City, Night Haunts, and Other Musics.
Cristina Odone is an Italian-British journalist, editor, and freelance writer. Cristina is the founder of the Parenting Circle Charity, and was the former Editor of the Catholic Herald, Contributor to The Telegraph, and Deputy Editor of the New Statesman.
Martha Lane Fox (CBE) is the President of the British Chambers of Commerce, Chancellor of the Open University and Chair of WeTransfer. She is a Patron of AbilityNet, Reprieve, Camfed and Just for Kids Law. From 2009 to 2013 she was Digital Champion for the UK and helped to create the Government Digital Service. She became a crossbench peer in the UK House of Lords in March 2013.
Kojo Koram is a writer and an academic, teaching at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in Accra, Ghana and raised on Merseyside, he is now based in London. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in November 2011. In addition to his academic writing, he has written for the New Statesman, the Guardian, Dissent, The Nation, and The Washington Post and has appeared on CNN and Sky News. He is the editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line (Pluto Press 2019) and author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray 2022).
Alice Bell heads up climate policy at the Wellcome Trust, which she recently joined after seven years at the climate action charity, Possible. She previously worked as a writer and academic, specialising in the politics of science and technology, and is the author of Our Biggest Experiment, a history of the climate crisis.
Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News’ International Editor. In recent years she has covered conflict in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria and Covid in Brazil. She is the author of In Extremis; the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin, which won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
Kurt Barling is Professor of Journalism at Middlesex University London and University Theme Director for Inclusive Social-economic Development and Enriching Lives through Culture. He is an award-winning BBC Journalist and film-maker and regularly broadcasts on cultural issues.
Katy Balls is the Spectator‘s political editor and a columnist for the paper. She hosts the Women with Balls podcast – which interviews females leading the way in their field – and is a regular contributor of the Spectator’s daily politics podcast Coffee House Shots. She was shortlisted for comment journalism of the year at the 2021 British Journalism Awards and for political commentator of the year at the 2017 Press Awards. Her work has featured in publications which include the Guardian, New York Times and Tatler. She is a regular on broadcast with appearances on Radio 4, Newsnight, the Andrew Marr Show and Have I Got News For You.
Ed Thomas is a Special Correspondent for BBC News. His work mainly appears on the BBC’s flagship Ten o’clock news bulletin, iPlayer and online. His reporting inside Wandsworth Prison and the inequality exposed by Covid in Burnley both won Royal Television Society awards. He also won The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils in 2022. His work often focuses on social injustice and institutional failure.
Annabel Deas is an investigative journalist at BBC Radio 4 based in Salford. In 2018 she was awarded funding by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to travel to the US to research best practice for telling the stories of marginalised people. She won The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2021 for her BBC Radio 5 Live seven-part podcast series, ‘Hope High’.
As Director of Partners for a New Economy, Jo leads a grant-making fund seeking to catalyse transformational change in our economy so that nature and all people can flourish. She is also a Visiting Professor at Cranfield University and the author of Equal Power: Gender Equality and How to Achieve It (Atlantic Books, 2018). Jo was previously an MP, Business Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrats.