Mary Kenny has extensive experience as a traditional storyteller with people of all ages and abilities, and is an established member of the Scottish Storytelling Directory. A visual artist and sculptor for 30 years, Mary’s studio ‘little art house’ is in the grounds of Traquair House. Originally from the Midlands, the Borders have been her Home for many years.

Rajesh Rai was introduced into the many different faiths of India including Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity, Sufism and Buddhism from a very early age. These faiths have formed a large part of his upbringing. His formal meditation training started in 1997, when he was taught a systematic practice by the Himalayan Institute. In 2001 he was initiated into the tradition of the Himalayan Masters on the banks of the Ganges at the Maha Kumbh Mela and has been a student of the Tradition since this time. He has been practicing Meditation on almost a daily basis since 1997.

He has travelled extensively to deepen his practice and has worked with various traditions including Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism, Sufism and Sikhism. He is a Barrister by profession specialising in Human Rights Law from Chambers in London. He is also a humanitarian and environmentalist where he has worked with and founded organisations around the world whose objectives are the rejuvenation of land, communities and promoting human rights. He helped found the first Indian vegetarian restaurant in Worcestershire with his family (www.mendiveg.com) (of which he is particularly proud), runs Poulstone Court retreat centre (www.poulstone.com) and founded Malvern Bhavan (www.malvernbhavan.com), a centre for Meditation and Enlightened Living.

Rosemary Goring has a history degree from the University of St Andrews. Since then, she has worked in publishing and newspapers, and is currently a reviewer with The Herald. Ms Goring is also the author of two acclaimed historical novels, After Flodden and Darce’s War. Her most recent book, Scotland: Her Story tells Scottish history through the eyes of Scotland’s women from all walks of life, from Queen Margaret to Nicola Sturgeon. Drawing on court and kirk records, diaries, newspapers and reports, the book brings to life a crucial historical perspective which is all too often hidden or ignored.

Clare Hunter has sewn since she was a child. She has been a banner-maker, community textile artist and curator for over twenty years. Ms Hunter is the founder of NeedleWorks in Glasgow, which works with people of all ages and cultures and uses sewing as a way to celebrate local history, document community experiences and share personal concerns through the creation of wall hangings and banners. She was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and a recipient of a Creative Scotland Award in 2016. Ms Hunter has explored the many many fascinating forgotten, little known and overlooked stories of sewing in her books Threads of Life and Embroidering her Truth: Mary Queen of Scots and the Language of Power. In the latter biography, Ms Hunter blends history, politics and memoir to tell the story of the queen in her own voice.

Caroline Michel has been the CEO of Peters Fraser + Dunlop literary and talent agency since 2007. Before that she headed up the William Morris Agency in London for three years. She has over 25 years’ worth of experience in the industry and ran both Vintage at Random House and Harper Press at HarperCollins. She is Chair of the Hay Literary Festival, Chair of the BFI Trust and was a Trustee of Somerset House. She is also a Fellow of the RSA and Vice President of the London Library, and sits on the Arts and Media Honours Committee.

Allan Little is an award-winning Scottish journalist and presenter who has reported from more than 80 countries including a variety of war zones, revolutions and natural disasters. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, Mr Little joined BBC Scotland as a news and current affairs researcher before moving to London to train as a radio reporter. He specialised in foreign reporting for BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, including accounts from the revolutions of 1989 across Eastern Europe. He then worked as a reporter for BBC News, reporting from hostile environments such as the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwait, former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Rwanda and Zaire. Mr Little also worked as the BBC Moscow correspondent and reported on the 1995 Afghanistan earthquakes before becoming the BBC’s Africa and later, Paris correspondent. He has won several awards, including three Gold Sony Radio Academy Awards for Reporter of the Year, the Bayeux War Correspondent of the Year, and in 2012 he won both the Thomas Reuters prize for Reporting Europe for his Radio 4 documentary, Europe’s Choice and the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism. Mr Little left the BBC in 2014 and today chairs the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

William Dalrynple is a Scottish-born bestselling author and historian. While studying at the University of Cambridge, he mirrored – on foot – the route of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia and wrote his first book, In Xanadu about the journey. This became a bestseller and in 1990 he won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award. He has written several books about his travels, particularly around India, and his historical works have earned him several notable awards. Among them are the Wolfson Prize, the Scottish Book of the Year prize and three honorary doctorates of letters from the Universities of St Andrews, Lucknow and Aberdeen. His most recent written work The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019) was shortlisted for numerous prizes. He is one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world’s largest writers festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.

Colin Grant is an author of five books. They include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the Pen/Ackerley Prize, 2013. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016. As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca; and A History of the N Word. Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Director of WritersMosaic, an innovative online platform for new writing. He also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, TLS, Granta and New York Review of Books. Grant’s Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC radio 4 Book of the Week and a Daily Telegraph Book of the year 2019. His latest memoir, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2023.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is a writer and professor of human rights and political philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. After leading the student movement that initiated a wave of constitutional reform throughout Latin America in the late 1990’s, he continued his studies in the United Kingdom where he obtained an LLM with Distinction at University College London, and a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He is the writer of the award-winning What If Latin America Ruled the World? which was listed as one the best non-fiction books of 2010 by The Financial Times. Dr Guardiola-Rivera is also the co-editor of the contemporary art and theory journal Naked Punch: An Engaged Review of Arts & Theory, and has engaged with an extensive range of publications and broadcasters, including Granta, El Espectador, the BBC World Service Nightwaves, and Al-Jazeera to name but a few. He is currently the Deputy Postgraduate Director of the Department of Law at Birkbeck, University of London and is recognized as one of the most representative voices of contemporary Latin American philosophy and literature.

Salman Ahmed became the Director of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff for the U.S. Department of State in January last year. Before this, Mr. Ahmed was a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he directed research and led a bipartisan task force dedicated to making U.S. foreign policy work better for the middle class. He served for eight years in the Obama-Biden administration, including as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. He also directly supported the secretary of state John Kerry’s negotiations with Russia on Syria between 2013 and 2016, and was the co-chair of the International Ceasefire task Force in Geneva. He previously worked for the UN for 15 years, working mainly on the management and reform of the UN’s international peacekeeping machinery; co-drafting the UN Secretary-General’s landmark report on the Fall of Srebrenica; and serving in field missions in Cambodia, South Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq. He has also taught at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Mr Ahmed has an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, and a BS in Economics from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Razia Iqbal has worked for the BBC for three decades, as a producer, correspondent in the UK and abroad, and now as a presenter of two flagship current affairs programmes: Newshour on the World Service and the World Tonight on Radio 4. She has spent the last six months in the US, teaching at Princeton University.

Barbara Dickson is a multi million selling recording artist. She was born in Scotland, and was scouted by RSO Records when performing in a Beatle’s musical in London’s West End. She sang on the original cast recording of ‘Evita’ the musical by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber, and was awarded the ‘Best Actress in a Musical’ award from the Scoeity of West End Theatres for her role in ‘Blood Brothers’. Her ‘All For a Song’ album in 1982 was cetified platinum and spent almost a year on the album chart. She was awarded an OBE from Her Majesty the Queen in 2002 for Services to Music and Drana, She has also presented several radio series for BBC Radio Scotland and had major roles on TV. She remains one of Scotland’s biggest-selling female singers of all time.

Once memorably described as sounding like ‘James Taylor meets John Prine in a second hand bookshop’, Anthony Toner is one of Northern Ireland’s leading songwriters and guitarists. This year he celebrates the release of his twelfth album, ‘Emperor’ – a completely acoustic revisiting of some of the finest songs in his back catalogue, including the much-requested ‘Sailortown’ and the sombre and unforgettable ‘Road to Fivemiletown’, among others. Find out more atwww.anthonytoner.net

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is a writer and professor of human rights and political philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. After leading the student movement that initiated a wave of constitutional reform throughout Latin America in the late 1990’s, he continued his studies in the United Kingdom where he obtained an LLM with Distinction at University College London, and a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He is the writer of the award-winning What If Latin America Ruled the World? which was listed as one the best non-fiction books of 2010 by The Financial Times. Dr Guardiola-Rivera is also the co-editor of the contemporary art and theory journal Naked Punch: An Engaged Review of Arts & Theory, and has engaged with an extensive range of publications and broadcasters, including Granta, El Espectador, the BBC World Service Nightwaves, and Al-Jazeera to name but a few. He is currently the Deputy Postgraduate Director of the Department of Law at Birkbeck, University of London and is recognized as one of the most representative voices of contemporary Latin American philosophy and literature.

Irvine Welsh is a novelist, short story teller and playwright. Welsh is the author of Trainspotting, his debut novel which achieved cult status and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed film in 1996. Welsh has since written eleven more books, five short story collections and numerous screenplays. These include the Trainspotting prequel Skagboys (2012) and sequel Porno (2002). Many of his works have been adapted for the stage and screen. In 2007 Wedding Belles was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA for Best Film and The Blade Artist, Welsh’s tenth book, was shortlisted for the Fiction Book of the Year at Saltire Literary Awards in 216. Born and raised in Leith, Edinburgh, Welsh’s success has taken him all over the world including Dublin, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Miami. His most recent novel, The Long Knives is due to be released in late August this year.

Colin Grant is an author of five books. They include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the Pen/Ackerley Prize, 2013. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016. As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca; and A History of the N Word. Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Director of WritersMosaic, an innovative online platform for new writing. He also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, TLS, Granta and New York Review of Books. Grant’s Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC radio 4 Book of the Week and a Daily Telegraph Book of the year 2019. His latest memoir, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2023.

Dr Brian Brivati was professor of contemporary history, human rights and life writing at Kingston University until 2009 and since then has combined writing and international capacity building work for the UK government, the UN and NGOs and INGOs. His most recent book was the edited collection Losing Afghanistan: The Fall of Kabul and the end of Western Intervention and he contributed the forward “Iraq’s Accidental Churchill” to Impossible Victory: How Iraq Defeated ISIS written by the former Iraqi PM Haider Al-Abadi. Since the war against Ukraine started in 2014, he has been engaged with a cross cutting network of civil society and political actors. Since the 2022 invasion, the network has been utilised to fill gaps, connect subject matter experts to the right people in Ukraine and other initiatives to support civil society, free media and civilian oversight of government.

Steve Richards is a British TV presenter and political columnist who has written for the Guardian, Independent, News Statesman and Spectator. An insightful observer of the British political scene, he has produced many television talks on influential political leaders and major political turning points. Mr Richards regularly presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster and hosts a vibrant one man stand up show called Rock & Roll Politics. He has written numerous books, including his latest The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success and Failure from Butler to Corbyn, which was awarded Book of the Year by The Times, The Guardian and Prospect.

Derek Goldman is Artistic and Executive Director and co-Founder of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University in Washington DC, with the mission to harness the power of performance to humanise global politics.  He is Chair of Georgetown University’s Department of Performing Arts and Director of the Theater & Performance Studies Program as well as Professor of Culture, Politics & Global Performance in GU’s School of Foreign Service.  He is an award-winning stage director, playwright/adapter, scholar, producer, and developer of new work, whose work has been seen throughout the US, off-Broadway, and internationally at leading venues such as Shakespeare Theater Company, Steppenwolf, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, Baltimore CenterStage, Folger, Ford’s Theater, Chicago Shakespeare, and many others. He co-wrote and directed the award-winning play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski starring Oscar-Nominated actor David Strathairn as the Polish Holocaust witness. The play is touring internationally to leading venues and will premiere Off-Broadway in New York in the Fall. The film version of Remember This is also premiering at leading festivals this summer.  Goldman is the author of more than 30 professionally produced plays and adaptations, including work published by Samuel French, and he has directed over 100 productions. His engagement with global performance in recent years has taken his work to Sudan, Cambodia, Bangladesh, China, Poland, South Africa, Australia, Peru, Japan, Bulgaria, Armenia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, France, and throughout the UK, among other places. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group (TCG); Vice-President of UNESCO’s International Theatre Institute, and Founding Director of the Global Network of Higher Education in the Performing Arts. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers at Georgetown and the Provost’s Award for Innovation in Teaching for his work as creator of In Your Shoes, an internationally recognised groundbreaking model for using performance to counter polarisation and to engage challenging conversations across difference through theatrical techniques and deep, respectful listening.

Jim Naughtie is a British radio and news presenter for the BBC. He began his career as a journalist at the Aberdeen Press and Journal before moving to the London offices of The Scotsman. He became its Chief Political Correspondent before working for The Washington Post and The Guardian. Mr Naughtie later moved into radio presenting and has anchored every BBC Radio UK election results programme since 1997, and worked on every US presidential election since 1988. He has been the main presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and his radio presenting has earned him two Sony Radio Awards: Radio Personality of the Year in 1991 and Voice of the Listener and Viewer Award in 2001. That same year, Mr Naughtie received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sterling and was appointed as its chancellor in 2008. He retired from regular presenting duties in 2016 and is currently the BBC’s Special Correspondent responsible for charting UK constitutional reform, as well as the BBC news’ Book Editor.

Tina Brown is an award-winning journalist, editor and author. Ms Brown was editor-in-chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk. In 2000, she was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to journalism and was inducted into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2007. Ms. Brown launched and edited digital news site The Daily Beast in 2008 which won the News Website of the Year award in 2012 and 2013. She founded Women in the World in 2009, a live journalism platform for female leaders, CEO’s, celebrities, and global activists and hosted ten sold-out summits at New York’s Lincoln Centre from 2010 to 2020. Ms Brown’s first book The Diana Chronicles (2007) was a New York Times bestseller. Her most recent work The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – The Truth and the Turmoil is a follow up to this biography and is an inside account of the British royal family’s battle to overcome the dramas of the Diana years – only to confront new, 21st-century crises.

Fi Martynoga is an environmental activist, journalist, museum researcher and a renowned figure in Scottish nature, sustainability, history and food circles.

Malachy Tallack is the award-winning author of three previous books, most recently a novel, The Valley at the Centre of the World (Canongate, 2018). It was shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize and longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. His first book, Sixty Degrees North (2015), was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and his second, The Un-Discovered Islands (2016), was named Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. Malachy is from Shetland, and currently lives in Stirlingshire.

Murray Pittock MAE FRSE is Pro Vice-Principal and Bradley Professor at the University of Glasgow and Scotland’s leading cultural historian. A prize lecturer for both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, in 2020, he was elected to the European Academy for his work on Scotland in a global context. His work has changed our understanding of the nature of Scottish history, culture and the cultural economy. His works include Enlightenment in a Smart City (2019, book of the year award), Culloden (2016, 2017, 2021, 2022, History Today Book of the Year choice), Material Culture and Sedition (2013, Saltire History Book of the Year shortlist), The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (1995, 1999, 2009), The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (2007, 2014), The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe (2014), Robert Burns in Global Culture (2011) and Robert Burns and the Scottish Economy (2020). He has held visiting appointments in Dublin, New York, Notre Dame, Prague, Yale and elsewhere and contributes to the media internationally, acting also as consultant and royal commentator. He is general editor of the £1M Collected Works of Allan Ramsay, funded by UK Research and Innovation and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and is co-Chair of the Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance (www.saha.scot), a Trustee of the National Trust for Scotland and sits on the advisory board of http://www.nise.eu/, which brings together research on nationalism in Europe.

William Dalrynple is a Scottish-born bestselling author and historian. While studying at the University of Cambridge, he mirrored – on foot – the route of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia and wrote his first book, In Xanadu about the journey. This became a bestseller and in 1990 he won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award. He has written several books about his travels, particularly around India, and his historical works have earned him several notable awards. Among them are the Wolfson Prize, the Scottish Book of the Year prize and three honorary doctorates of letters from the Universities of St Andrews, Lucknow and Aberdeen. His most recent written work The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019) was shortlisted for numerous prizes. He is one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world’s largest writers festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.

Sarah Helm, grew up in North Yorkshire and studied English at Cambridge. She then worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times and The Independent, first focussing on criminal justice, human rights and the Northern Ireland conflict, before being posted abroad as a foreign correspondent, covering the Israel-Palestine conflict and the war in Bosnia. Her first book, A Life in Secrets, is a biography of Vera Atkins, the World War Two intelligence officer for SOE, who sent women agents behind Nazi lines, and hunted for the missing. Her next book, If This is a Woman, is about Ravensbrück the Nazi Concentration camp for Women, told largely through the words of the last survivors.

Her play, Loyalty, a drama about conflicting loyalties set against the backdrop of the Iraq War, was staged at the Hampstead Theatre. She now freelances for several publications and is working on a new book about Gaza. Sarah lives in London with her husband, Jonathan Powell, and their two children.

Raja Shehadeh was born in Jaffa, Israel and trained to be a lawyer in London. He is a founder of the human rights organisation Al-Haq, which is an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. Mr Shehadeh is an award-winning author and has written multiple books on international law, human rights and the Middle East. In 2008 he won the Orwell Prize for political writing for his book Palestinian Walks. His biography Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine was chosen for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week and Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation won the 2020 Moore prize. Mr Shehadeh currently lives in Ramallah, West Bank. His most recent work We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I will be published in early August 2022.

Derek Goldman is Artistic and Executive Director and co-Founder of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University in Washington DC, with the mission to harness the power of performance to humanise global politics.  He is Chair of Georgetown University’s Department of Performing Arts and Director of the Theater & Performance Studies Program as well as Professor of Culture, Politics & Global Performance in GU’s School of Foreign Service.  He is an award-winning stage director, playwright/adapter, scholar, producer, and developer of new work, whose work has been seen throughout the US, off-Broadway, and internationally at leading venues such as Shakespeare Theater Company, Steppenwolf, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, Baltimore CenterStage, Folger, Ford’s Theater, Chicago Shakespeare, and many others. He co-wrote and directed the award-winning play Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski starring Oscar-Nominated actor David Strathairn as the Polish Holocaust witness. The play is touring internationally to leading venues and will premiere Off-Broadway in New York in the Fall. The film version of Remember This is also premiering at leading festivals this summer.  Goldman is the author of more than 30 professionally produced plays and adaptations, including work published by Samuel French, and he has directed over 100 productions. His engagement with global performance in recent years has taken his work to Sudan, Cambodia, Bangladesh, China, Poland, South Africa, Australia, Peru, Japan, Bulgaria, Armenia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, France, and throughout the UK, among other places. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group (TCG); Vice-President of UNESCO’s International Theatre Institute, and Founding Director of the Global Network of Higher Education in the Performing Arts. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers at Georgetown and the Provost’s Award for Innovation in Teaching for his work as creator of In Your Shoes, an internationally recognised groundbreaking model for using performance to counter polarisation and to engage challenging conversations across difference through theatrical techniques and deep, respectful listening.

Nicola Sturgeon  MSP is the current, and fifth, First Minister of Scotland. Since 2014, she has been the leader of the Scottish National Party and the Member of Scottish Parliament for  Glasgow Southside. Formerly a law graduate from The University of  Glasgow, she originally worked as a solicitor. Having already become a  member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, she was first elected to  the  Scottish Parliament in 1999 and served as the SNP’s shadow minister for  education, health and justice. Since then, Ms Sturgeon has held multiple positions  within the party serving as Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing,  Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investment and Cities, Deputy Leader of  the Party and Deputy First Minister of Scotland before becoming First Minister. She has won several awards including both the title of Scottish  Politician of the Year and the Donald Dewar Debater of the Year Award-winning each 3 three times.  

Alastair Campbell is a writer, communicator and strategist best known for his role as former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and director of communications and strategy. In 2007, he published his first book The Blair Years which was an instant Sunday Times Number 1 bestseller. He has written seventeen books in total, including Number 1 best-seller Winners and How They Succeed. His latest, Living Better: How I learned to survive depression (2020), was another Sunday Times best-seller. In the wake of the referendum, he helped set up The New European newspaper where he is editor-at-large and writes a weekly column. For several years, he also wrote a monthly interview for GQ magazine. Mr Campbell has been a Humanitas Visiting Professor on Media at Cambridge University, and has been honoured by several Irish universities for his contribution to the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Still active in politics and campaigns in Britain and overseas, he now splits his time between writing, speaking, broadcasting, charities and consultancy.

Jonathan Powell is CEO of Inter Mediate, the charity he founded in 2011 to work on conflict resolution around the world. Inter Mediate is working on 10 conflicts at the moment. Mr Powell worked on the negotiations with ETA in the Basque Country, on the negotiations in Colombia with the FARC and on the peace negotiations in Mozambique. He was Chief of Staff to Tony Blair from 1995 to 2007 and from 1997 to 2007 was also Chief British Negotiator on Northern Ireland. Mr Powell is also the author of Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World and Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflict.

Stephen Dunbar-Johnson is the President of International at the The New York Times Company. Having been appointed to lead the company’s global expansion in 2013, he is responsible for the oversight and strategic development of the Times Company’s international businesses. He served as Executive Vice President of the International Herald Tribune S.A.S. from September 2006 where he was responsible for conference and advertising revenue, the newspaper’s circulation and marketing departments, and commercial operations in Asia. Mr Dunbar-Johnson has held several business development roles around the world during his twelve years working for The Financial Times, including Advertising Manager in France and Vice President of Advertising in the Americas.

Christina Lamb is a bestselling author and one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents. When Ms Lamb was 22, she moved to Peshawar to cover the Mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union and within two years she had been named Young Journalist of the Year, since then winning 15 major awards including being named Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times and winning Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. She was made an OBE in 2013 and is an honorary fellow of University College, Oxford. Ms Lamb is currently Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Times of London and is particularly known for her writing highlighting how war affects women. She has written nine books including the bestselling The Africa House and I Am Malala. Her first play Drones, Baby, Drones co-written with Ron Hutchinson was performed at London’s Arcola Theatre in 2016. Her latest book Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women is the first major account to address the scale of rape and sexual violence in modern conflict.

Razia Iqbal has worked for the BBC for three decades, as a producer, correspondent in the UK and abroad, and now as a presenter of two flagship current affairs programmes: Newshour on the World Service and the World Tonight on Radio 4. She has spent the last six months in the US, teaching at Princeton University.

Gerry Hassan is a leading authority and commentator on Scottish and UK politics. He is Professor of Social Change at Glasgow Caledonian University and the author and editor of numerous books including The Strange Death of Labour Scotland, Caledonian Dreaming: The Quest for a Different Scotland and The People’s Flag and the Union Jack: An Alternative History of Britain and the Labour Party. He has just published A Better Nation: The Challenges of Scottish Independence (Luath Press) edited with Simon Barrow and author of the forthcoming Scotland Rising: The Case for Independence (Pluto Press) published at the end of September.

Tim Phillips is a social entrepreneur who has launched several innovative organisations in the non-profit and for-profit sectors that address critical emerging global issues. In 1992, he co-founded Beyond Conflict (formerly the Project on Justice in Times of Transition), a pioneering and widely respected conflict resolution and reconciliation initiative that has made important contributions to the consolidation of peace and democracy around the world. In the private sector, he was a founder of Energia Global International Ltd. (EGI), which was a leader in the development and operation of privately-owned renewable energy facilities in Central and South America in the early 1990s. He helped launch and currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Club of Madrid, which was founded in 2001 with the support of 30 current and former heads of state and government to promote the consolidation of democracy around the world.

Allan Little is an award-winning Scottish journalist and presenter who has reported from more than 80 countries including a variety of war zones, revolutions and natural disasters. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, Mr Little joined BBC Scotland as a news and current affairs researcher before moving to London to train as a radio reporter. He specialised in foreign reporting for BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, including accounts from the revolutions of 1989 across Eastern Europe. He then worked as a reporter for BBC News, reporting from hostile environments such as the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwait, former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Rwanda and Zaire. Mr Little also worked as the BBC Moscow correspondent and reported on the 1995 Afghanistan earthquakes before becoming the BBC’s Africa and later, Paris correspondent. He has won several awards, including three Gold Sony Radio Academy Awards for Reporter of the Year, the Bayeux War Correspondent of the Year, and in 2012 he won both the Thomas Reuters prize for Reporting Europe for his Radio 4 documentary, Europe’s Choice and the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism. Mr Little left the BBC in 2014 and today chairs the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Steve Richards is a British TV presenter and political columnist who has written for the Guardian, Independent, News Statesman and Spectator. An insightful observer of the British political scene, he has produced many television talks on influential political leaders and major political turning points. Mr Richards regularly presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster and hosts a vibrant one man stand up show called Rock & Roll Politics. He has written numerous books, including his latest The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success and Failure from Butler to Corbyn, which was awarded Book of the Year by The Times, The Guardian and Prospect.