Sophia leads a major new programme of work at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, to imagine, seed and grow radical new approaches to tackling poverty. Previously, Sophia was CEO of Little Village, a London-based charity that she set up in 2016 that works to tackle child poverty. She’s held senior roles at the thinktanks Resolution Foundation and Demos.
Monique Roffey is an award winning Trinidadian born British writer of novels, essays, literary journalism and a memoir. Her most recent novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch (Peepal Tree Press), won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2020 and was longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. She is a co-founder of Writers Rebel within Extinction Rebellion, and a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Sana Goyal is Wasafiri’s Deputy and Reviews Editor. Formerly the Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press and the Digital Editor at Wasafiri, she now does Marketing and Outreach at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry London, PBLJ, Brixton Review of Books, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She lives between Birmingham and Bombay and tweets @SansyG.
Dennis Duncan is a writer, translator and lecturer in English at University College London. His most recent book is Index, A History of the, Book Parts (co-edited with Adam Smyth). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and lives in London.
Adam Roberts is Professor of Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of twenty novels, almost all of them science-fiction, and an equivalent number of non-fictional works. His most recent works are the novel Purgatory Mount (Gollancz 2021) and the academic monograph Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors (Open Book Publishing 2021).
Kennetta Hammond Perry, PhD, FRHistS serves as founding Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre and is a Reader in History at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. She has published widely, including a book-length study on Caribbean migration to Britain following World War II titled London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford Press, 2016).
Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman. He co-hosts the New Statesman podcast and writes for both the print magazine and the NS website. He has also written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Financial Times and the i.
Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor of The Economist and was its global Policy Editor from 2010-16. She writes on political and international affairs and runs Economist Radio, the company’s awarding-winning audio arm.
Anne is a former bureau chief in Moscow, Berlin and the Balkans, and has also written weekly politics column for the Evening Standard for 15 years. She also presents Across the Red Line on BBC Radio 4.
David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History at King’s College London. He has written several books, most recently The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (Penguin, 2018). He writes on history and politics for the Guardian, the New Statesman and others.
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.
Helen has spent most of her career covering the arts industry, primarily on the staff of The Sunday Times, where she worked for 34 years, the last 25 of them as arts editor. She started out in academia, teaching English while gaining an MA at Colorado University in Boulder, USA, then going on to a PhD there. Back in the UK she moved into freelance journalism, writing about everything from film to fashion. Her Sunday Times section, Culture, won Supplement of the Year at the UK Press Awards in 2003 and was nominated multiple times; she has also regularly served on juries (London Film Festival, South Bank Show/Sky Arts awards, So You Think You’re Funny? awards) and has chaired the Edinburgh Comedy (formerly Perrier) Awards twice.
She now reviews theatre for the Arts Desk and is on the boards of The Mono Box, which provides assistance to people of all backgrounds who want to work in the theatre industry, and of IF Opera, a new opera company serving southwest England.
Clive Myrie is a multi award winning journalist, one of the BBC’s most experienced foreign correspondents and a recognised face as a BBC News presenter. Born in Bolton, Lancashire he studied law at the University of Sussex. Clive has served as the BBC’s Asia, Africa, Washington and Europe Correspondent. He has a particular interest in US politics, having covered the administrations of three Presidents (Clinton, Bush and Obama,) and reported on the last seven Presidential races, including most recently the election of Joe Biden. As well as presenting the One, Six and Ten 0’Clock News bulletins on BBC One, and hosting news shows on the BBC News Channel, Clive continues to travel the world as a reporter, and makes features and programmes for Panorama, Newsnight and Radio 4.
Iain Martin is the editor, publisher and co-founder of Reaction. He writes a weekly column on politics for The Times and appears as a commentator on the BBC and CNN. He is the author of the award-winning book Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British Economy and of Crash, Bang, Wallop: the inside story of Big bang and financial revolution that changed the world.
Rosie Blau is Editor of 1843 Magazine, sister publication to The Economist and named for the year The Economist was founded. She joined The Economist in 2011 as a reporter on the Britain section. From 2014-17 she was based in Beijing as China Correspondent. She began her reporting career on trade magazines and worked at the Financial Times from 2002-2011, where her jobs included Books Editor and Leader Writer. She was a judge for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2010.
Kamran Abbasi is a doctor, journalist, editor and broadcaster. Following five years in hospital medicine, working in various medical specialties such as psychiatry and cardiology, he moved into senior editorial roles at the British Medical Journal from 1997 to 2005. He is now back at The BMJ in a new role as executive editor for content, leading the journal’s strategic growth internationally, digitally, and in print.
Carrie Gracie grew up in northeast Scotland and set up a restaurant before taking a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. She spent a year teaching in two Chinese universities and then built a small film business before joining the BBC in 1987 as a trainee producer. In 2014, she took up a newly created post as BBC China editor and covered all key news stories in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In January 2018, Carrie left her post as BBC China editor in protest at unequal pay, publishing an open letter to BBC audiences and giving evidence at a parliamentary select committee. She returned to BBC HQ as a news presenter and continued to campaign for an equal, fair and transparent pay structure at the national broadcaster. In September 2019 she published her first book Equal: How We Fix the Gender Pay Gap and in 2020 she left the BBC to pursue other projects.