Prize type: Journalism prizeTTTT

Isabel Hardman is Assistant Editor of the Spectator and presenter of Radio 4’s ‘The Week in Westminster’. She regularly writes political columns for other publications, including The Times, Sunday Times, Observer and the Independent. Isabel is the author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians – which was longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize, shortlisted for Waterstones’ 2018 Book of the Year, and won a Parliamentary Book Award – and The Natural Health Service. Her most recent book, Fighting for Life, published by Viking/Penguin, explores the critical moments in the history of the NHS.

Jonathan Shainin founded the Guardian Long Read and was later the paper’s head of opinion and the editor of Cotton Capital, an award-winning investigation into its founders’ connections to slavery. He edited The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent, an anthology of Israeli journalism. He has worked at the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and The Caravan.

John Pienaar is one of Britain’s best-connected and most highly respected journalists, spending nearly three decades at the BBC before joining Times Radio’s Drive programme as presenter in 2020. John’s BBC career began in 1992 as a political reporter. He went on to become BBC Deputy Political Editor and presenter of several TV and radio shows including Pienaar’s Politics on Radio 5Live. Before the BBC John was a political correspondent at The Independent and the Press Association. John trained at the South London Press before becoming its Old Bailey Correspondent.

Matt Walsh is head of school at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. Prior to moving into higher education, Matt worked as a journalist and executive producer in broadcast and digital media for more than 20 years.

In 1999 Matt joined ITN from the BBC as a reporter and rose to become Deputy Editor of the ITV News Channel. Later, he set-up The Times’ multimedia journalism department and launched podcasts and web video series with presenters including John Oliver, Clive James and Gordon Ramsay. Matt continues to combine teaching with consultancy and industry work.

Maryam Moshiri is a Chief Presenter at BBC News. She began her career as a business news presenter, and was the face of business on the BBC News channel and BBC world for 16 years, covering all the top business stories from the economic impact of the 9/11 attacks to the global financial crisis.

In 2019 Maryam became a main news presenter on BBC World and BBC News, anchoring OS, Global and The Context, and covering significant events, such as the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the death of Queen Elizabeth II. In February 2024 the BBC launched ‘The World Today with Maryam Moshiri’ on the BBC’s news channel, which reaches 112 million people each week globally.

David Gauke is a former Conservative MP and Cabinet Minister, having served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor.  He lost the whip as a Conservative MP in September 2019 after voting to oppose a no deal Brexit and left Parliament later that year having stood as independent.  David is now a senior consultant with a leading City law firm and is a columnist with the New Statesman and ConservativeHome.

Yuen Chan is currently senior lecturer in journalism at City, University of London. She was previously Senior Lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and also served as Assistant Dean (Communication) for the Faculty of Social Science. As a journalist, she worked in print, television and radio in Hong Kong, and was later based in Shanghai and Beijing as a correspondent.

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at the Atlantic magazine, a former deputy editor of the New Statesman, presenter of The New Gurus and The Spark on BBC Radio 4, and the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights.

Janine Gibson is editor of FT Weekend. Previously she was the FT’s head of digital projects and platforms. She joined the FT in 2019 after 4 years as Editor-in-Chief of BuzzFeed UK, where the team won News Website of the Year at the 2017 UK Press Awards. Prior to BuzzFeed, she was deputy editor of the Guardian, most notably launching The Guardian US in 2013 and overseeing its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Edward Snowden leaks. Her other roles at The Guardian included Media Editor and Editor of theguardian.com

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a Project Manager at Thomson Reuters Foundation and has previously worked for the international Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and WHO in Iran. Nazanin was detained in Iran in April 2016 and was held hostage for 6 years. Many people campaigned for her during her incarceration leading to her release in March 2022.

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.

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.

Isabel Hilton is a London based writer and broadcaster and founder in 2006 of the China Dialogue Trust (CDT). She now serves as senior advisor to the CDT, which publishes www.chinadialogue.net , a fully bilingual Chinese English website devoted to building a shared approach on climate change and environmental issues, as well as www.thethirdpole.net, www.dialogochino.net, and www.chinadialogueocean.net.

Isabel Hilton studied Chinese in Edinburgh and China before embarking on a career in broadcast and print journalism that included authoring and co-authoring several books, reporting from Latin America, Europe and South and East Asia, working for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the BBC, STV, the Independent, the New Yorker and many others. She is a Visiting Professor at the Lau Institute, KCL, was appointed OBE in 2008, serves as a Senior Advisor to the China Council and holds two honorary doctorates.

Sameer Padania works with diverse stakeholders to defend, support and grow the public interest journalism ecosystem in the UK, Europe and beyond. In 2021, he led the Forum on Information and Democracy’s global report calling on governments to deliver A New Deal for Journalism. Over the last decade, he has worked for funders including Open Society, Google, Nesta, and Wellcome as a grantmaker, assessor and strategist. He has written widely-used practical guides on funding journalism and media and investigative journalism, and the Journalism Funders Forum newsletter on trends in journalism funding across Europe. He began his career working on a range of journalism, digital media, activism and policy initiatives across the developing world. He is a co-founder of the Charitable Journalism Project, a trustee of the Indigo Trust and of The Doc Society, and a Fellow of the RSA.

Marcus Ryder is the Head of External Consultancies at the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity which was set up to explore and increase diversity across the industry including journalism, acting, film, TV and radio. He has spent over 25 years working in the media across the world including the UK, China and Malaysia; and eight years as a senior executive at the BBC, winning numerous industry awards – from Baftas to Royal Television Society Awards and Foreign Press Association Awards.

In 2021 he was appointed the Chair of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) Council, and is also currently a trustee at the Press Pad Charitable Foundation as well as on the board of the BEATS (British East Asians in Theatre & Screen). A keen amateur runner he has completed 20 marathons on every continent except Antarctica.