Brought up in London, Christy Lefteri is the child of Cypriot refugees. She is a lecturer in creative writing at Brunel University.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo was born out of her time working as a volunteer at a Unicef supported refugee centre in Athens.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of a number of bestselling and prize-winning books including The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Holloway and Landmarks. His work has been translated into many languages and widely adapted for film, television and radio, and his essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and the Guardian.

Most recently, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forster Award for Literature 2017. Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently completing Underland, about underworlds real and imagined.

Dina Nayeri was born in Iran during the revolution and arrived in America when she was ten years old. She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, an O. Henry Award and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. The author of two novels and contributor to The Displaced, her work has been published in over twenty countries. Her stories and essays have been published in Best American Short Stories and by the New York Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal and Granta. She lives in London. dinanayeri.com | @DinaNayeri

Philippe Sands is Professor of Law at University College London and a practising barrister at Matrix Chambers. He frequently appears before international courts, and has been involved in many of the most important cases of recent years, including Pinochet, Congo, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, Guantanamo and the Rohingya of Myanmar.

He is the author of LAWLESS WORLD, TORTURE TEAM and the Sunday Times bestselling EAST WEST STREET, which also won the Baillie Gifford Prize and was named Non-fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

Simon Smith is a respected cinematographer who has spent the last four decades shooting documentaries for Australian TV and film. He has been privileged to hear and record the stories of First Nations communities, survivors of the atom bomb and the genocide of Cambodia, soldiers and artists and thinkers of all kinds the world over. With his camera, he has travelled all over Australia, China, Japan, Indonesia, PNG and Vanuatu, North America and Europe.

'Someone in our family shot a prince' was a story told to Simon by his mother when he was a young boy. It thrilled him then, and thrilled him again when he stumbled on it, in magical ways, almost a decade ago. He knew he had to find out more, and tell the world.

Simon plunged into researching the facts behind the family story. Then he began to write. The result is his first novel: A Man of Honour. Simon lives with his partner Ron, and their beloved cat Danny Boy, on Gadigal Land at Darlinghurst – only 100 metres from where his relative, Henry James O'Farrell, was incarcerated, tried and executed.

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to do an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths.

Her first novel was The Still Point, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and won the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and her second was Orkney, which won a 2014 Somerset Maugham Award.

Shami Chakrabarti is Britain's leading human rights campaigner. Labour's Shadow Attorney General and a member of the House of Lords, Chakrabarti is an Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester, an Honorary Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and Mansfield College Oxford and a Master of the Bench of Middle Temple.

Chakrabarti was the Director of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties from 2003 to 2016 and the Chancellor of the University of Essex from 2014 to 2017.

She is the author of On Liberty, an impassioned defence of human rights, published in 2014.