Judges

Jessie Lau

Jessie Lau is an independent writer, editor and multi-platform journalist from Hong Kong. She’s spent the past decade covering the intersections of human rights, politics and culture from Asia, Europe and the United States. Her essays and reportage have appeared in The Guardian, BBC, Los Angeles Review of Books, CNN, Times Literary Supplement, WIRED, The Economist and many more publications. Jessie is the founder of New Tide, Britain’s only East and Southeast Asian journalism network, head of the magazine team at NüVoices, a non-profit supporting women and minorities working on China topics, and contributing editor at Translator, a publication of translated journalism.

Katie Prescott

Katie Prescott is technology business editor at The Times and a weekly columnist for the newspaper’s award-winning business section. She co-hosts The Times Tech Podcast and is a familiar voice to millions of listeners after a decade reporting for the BBC and presenting the business news on Radio 4’s Today Programme. Her book, The Curious Case of Mike Lynch will be published by Pan Macmillan in mid-November 2025.

Lawrence Freedman

Sir Lawrence Freedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. He was Professor of War Studies at King’s College London from 1982 to 2014, and was Vice-Principal from 2003 to 2013.  Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995, he was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997. In June 2009 he was appointed to serve as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War. His most recent book is Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (2022). He also, with his son Sam, has a substack, Comment is Freed.

Rohan Silva (Chair)

Rohan Silva is the founder of Libreria bookshop in Spitalfields, and co-founder of Second Home, which has built creative spaces for cultural events and entrepreneurship in London, Lisbon and Los Angeles.

Rohan has written for the Times, Evening Standard, Observer and other publications, and has been a judge for the Samuel Johnson Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize.

He has been an Honorary Fellow at the Royal College of Art and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics – and has served on the boards of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London Contemporary Music Festival and Entrepreneur First.

Sam Bowman

Sam Bowman is a founding editor of Works in Progress and head of publishing at Stripe. He is also a member of the Mercatus Center’s board of directors. He is the author of essays including The housing theory of everything and Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated. He lives in London with his family.

Cal Revely-Calder

Cal Revely-Calder is literary editor of the Telegraph. He has contributed to the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, among others, and has won awards for criticism from the Guardian and Frieze. His book on convenience culture is forthcoming with Verso.

Fiammetta Rocco (Chair)

Fiammetta Rocco grew up in Kenya and read Arabic at Oxford. For 25 years she was the culture editor of The Economist, and is now a writer and critic based in London. She runs the International Booker Prize and is an energetic advocate of reading and story-telling. Fiammetta has been the judge of numerous prizes for fiction and non-fiction. Her writing has won awards on both sides of the Atlantic. And her book, The Miraculous Fever Tree, about malaria and the discovery of quinine, was published in Britain and in America. She and her family live between London and Scotland.

Olivette Otele

Olivette Otele is a Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London. She holds a Ph.D. from La Sorbonne. Olivette a former Vice President of the Royal Historical Society, received an Honorary Degree from Concordia University, Canada. She was a judge of the International Booker Prize, Chair of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. She is a regular contributor to the press (BBC, Guardian) and a broadcaster (Netflix, BBC). Her book African Europeans was shortlisted for the LA Time Book Prize and for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2021. She also advises policymakers on colonial history and restorative justice (Welsh Government, Guardian newspaper).

Scarlett Baron

Scarlett Baron is an Associate Professor in the English Department at University College London. She is the author of ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Birth of Intertextuality: The Riddle of Creativity (Routledge, 2019). Her current research focuses on the representation of the self in contemporary autofiction. She is the co-host of the Selfy Stories podcast, which marries philosophy and literature to consider conceptions of the self in the twenty-first century.

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi

Sayeeda, Baroness Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim Cabinet Minister, is also a lawyer, businesswoman and racial justice campaigner and has consistently been listed as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world.

Appointed to the House of Lords as a life peer at the age of thirty-six, she served as Chairman of the Conservative Party, in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and as Minister for Faith and Communities.

She is advisor at the Bridge Institute, Georgetown University Washington D.C, a member of the International Advisory Board on FORB, University of Notre Dame and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Greater Manchester.

She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Exeter, Aston, Birmingham City, and Bolton Universities, as well as from the University of Law.

Sayeeda is author of two books; The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain and Muslims Don’t Matter.

She is a regular daytime TV presenter and news commentator. In 2024 she launched the award-winning Podcast ‘A Muslim and A Jew Go There’.

Greg Williams (Chair)

Greg Williams is the Editor-in-Chief of WIRED UK and Deputy Global Editorial
Director of WIRED. A content creator, speaker and strategic forecaster who has
held senior leadership roles in London and New York, Greg is interested in
what’s coming next and understanding the ideas, organizations, trends and
technologies that will shape the future. He has interviewed many senior leaders
in business, technology and policy, including Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Demis
Hassabis and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Greg has written for numerous titles, including The Guardian, Newsweek and
The Observer and was awarded British Society of Magazine Editors ‘Editor of
the Year, Science & Technology’ in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2024. His longform
story on the UK’s biggest ever cocaine heist was highly commended by the
British Society of Magazine Editors. Greg was a judge of the Royal Society
Science Book of the Year award 2018 and is the author of six novels.

Meenakshi Ravi

Meenakshi Ravi is an Executive Producer with Al Jazeera English. She has been with the channel since its launch and works across several programmes – including The Listening Post, which examines media power globally; All Hail, a series unpacking the social, economic, and political forces that define our lives; and debate and discussion shows such as Head to Head and Reframe. Before joining Al Jazeera, Meenakshi worked with CNBC in Mumbai, India.

Nick Davies

Nick Davies spent 40 years as a journalist, mainly doing investigative work for The Guardian. He was centrally involved in uncovering the phone-hacking scandal in Rupert Murdoch’s empire; initiating the alliance of news organisations which published US official secrets obtained by Wikileaks; and working in the team which handled Edward Snowden’s leaks about the US National Security Agency. He wrote six books including Flat Earth News which investigated the flow of falsehood, distortion and propaganda through mainstream news organisations; and Dark Heart which exposed the hidden world of UK poverty including the return of widespread child prostitution.

Lígia Teixeira

Lígia Teixeira is the founding Chief Executive of the Centre for Homelessness Impact, part of the UK’s What Works Network. She founded the Centre in 2018 to bring rigorous evidence, creativity, and systems thinking to the mission of ending homelessness — helping governments and communities focus on what works.

She is a member of the UK Government’s Expert Group on Homelessness, a Non-Executive Director of the Robertson Trust, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Lígia also serves on the Assessor Council of the Economic and Social Research Council and holds an honorary degree from the University of Glasgow and a PhD in Government from the London School of Economics.

Before establishing the Centre, she led the evidence and impact programme at Crisis UK and held research roles at the Young Foundation, the Refugee Council, and the International Labour Organisation.

Mel Young

Mel Young is President of the Homeless World Cup which he co-founded in 2003. Under his leadership, the organisation has expanded all over the world and now has partners in over 70 countries, touching the lives of over 100,000 homeless people every year – more than one million people in the last decade. There have been 20 annual events across the world since 2003, including Mexico City, Rio, Paris, Cape Town, Amsterdam, Santiago, Melbourne, Milan, Seoul and Oslo in 2025.

Having initially worked as a journalist, including on a community newspaper in Wester Hailes in Edinburgh, he co-founded The Big Issue in Scotland in 1993. He also co-founded Senscot (Social Entrepreneurs Network Scotland), the City Lynx magazine and the New Consumer magazine. He is the former President and Honorary President of INSP (International Network for Street Papers). He has five Honorary Degrees from Scottish Universities. He has received several awards, including an MBE and the prestigious Jackie Robinson Humanitarian Award. He was given The Edinburgh Award in 2024. He believes passionately that homelessness can be ended and has dedicated most of his life since 1993 in various practical and global initiatives working with homeless people to change their lives.

Michael Gove (Chair)

Michael Gove is the Editor of The Spectator. As the former Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath and UK Government Cabinet Minister, he served in Cabinet across five government departments for more than a decade, from the 2010 Coalition government onwards.

As Secretary of State for Education, he steered through some of the biggest changes to education in half a century. He went on to serve in the cabinets of three of the four subsequent Prime Ministers, including as Chief Whip, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Secretary of State for Justice, for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

In May 2025, Michael was made a peer in Rishi Sunak’s honours list and joined the House of Lords, choosing the title of Lord Gove of Torry.

Sarah O’Connor

Sarah O’Connor is a columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times, where she writes about employment, technology and economics. She first joined the FT in 2007, and she has reported from London, Washington DC and Reykjavik. Her first book, on work and technology, will be published in 2026 by Allen Lane in the UK and Godine in the US.

Abby Jitendra

Abby is a Principal Policy Adviser at thinktank Joseph Rowntree Foundation where she leads a programme of policy, influencing and funding work on care, work and family. She has 10 years of experience in making policy change on work, welfare, and energy. She was named ‘Campaigner of the Year’ for her campaigning during the cost of living crisis while at Citizens Advice, and a ‘visionary to watch’ by Red Magazine in 2023.

Amber Rudd

Amber Rudd is the former MP for Hastings and Rye from 2010 to 2019. During that period she served in cabinet under three different PMs, and held the roles of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Home Secretary, Women and Equalities Minister, and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

She now works in the private sector focusing on the energy sector. She is a Non Executive Director for both Centrica, and RyanAir and a Trustee for RUSI, the foreign policy think tank. She co-hosts the new Podcast, The Crisis Room , a weekly review of the latest foreign policy crisis.

Mina Smallman

Mina Smallman is a retired Anglican priest and former high school teacher, as well as an activist, and the author of A Better Tomorrow Life Lessons in Hope and Strength.

In June 2020, Mina’s daughters – Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman – were killed in a park by a stranger as they celebrated Bibaa’s birthday. Mina has been campaigning ever since, challenging the toxic culture in the Metropolitan Police, and calling out the wider institutional misogyny, racism and classism in Britain.

An Honorary Fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, Mina was awarded the title of Emeritus the Venerable in recognition of her work as Archdeacon of Southend.

Philip Collins (Chair)

Phil founded The Draft in 2018 and leads all writing and editorial work. He was previously chief speechwriter to Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street and is now Editor in Chief of Prospect magazine. He is the author of six books and has previously been Chair of Trustees at Demos, the Director of the Social Market Foundation, a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford and an investment banker.