Democracy

MARGARET ATWOOD, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, now an award-winning TV series. Her other works of fiction include Cat's Eye, finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator's Award. She lives in Toronto.

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the classics editor of the TLS. Her books include the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii, The Parthenon, Confronting the Classics and SPQR.

Erica Benner is a Fellow in Political Philosophy at Yale University. She is the author of numerous books, most recently Be Like the Fox: Conversations with Machiavelli (Penguin Allen Lane, 2016).

In addition to her award-winning novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Lola Shoneyin has written three volumes of poetry, So All the Time I Was Sitting on an Egg, Song of a Riverbird, and For the Love of Flight, as well as three children’s books: Mayowa and the Masquerade; Do As You Are Told, Baji; and Iyaji, the Housegirl. Shoneyin is the founder of Book Buzz Foundation, which organizes the Ake Arts & Book Festival. She also runs Ouida Books, a publishing house and one of the most vibrant bookstores in Nigeria. Shoneyin lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

Yuan Yang was born in 1990 in China, where she lived with her grandparents for four years before her parents brought her to the UK. She returned to China as an adult, posted there as a correspondent for the Financial Times. After the mass expulsion of journalists from China in 2020, she was one of the few journalists writing in English left in the country, ultimately moving back to the FT's London headquarters as their China-Europe Correspondent. In 2024, she was elected as the Labour MP for Earley and Woodley, becoming the first Chinese-born MP in British history. Private Revolutions is her debut book.