Charles Kenny is a writer-researcher at the Center for Global Development and has worked on policy reforms in global health as well as UN peacekeeping and combating international financial corruption. Previously, he spent fifteen years as an economist at the World Bank, travelling the planet from Baghdad and Kabul to Brasilia and Beijing. He is the author of The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease, Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More, and The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest Is Great for the West. He earned a history degree at Cambridge and has graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and Cambridge.

Anthony Kenny has held many prestigious titles over the course of his career, including Master of Balliol College, Oxford; Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford; President of the British Academy; President of the Royal Institute of Philosophy; and Chair of the Board of the British Library. With over fifty books published in his career, his most recent works are The Enlightenment: A Very Short History (2017) and a memoir, Brief Encounters, to be published in September 2018.