Madeleine Albright served as America's sixty-fourth Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001.

Her distinguished career also includes positions on Capitol Hill, the National Security Council, and as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. She is a resident of Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

Aminatta Forna is the author of the novels The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and the memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her books have won multiple prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Book Award, and been shortlisted for many others, among them the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Neustadt Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Dublin International IMPAC Award.

In 2014 Forna won the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, an award from Yale University in honour of an author's body of work. Forna has acted as judge for a number of literary awards, including the International Man Booker. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. In 2017, she was awarded an OBE.

Timothy Snyder is Levin Professor of History at Yale University, and has written and edited a number of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history: his most recent book, On Tyranny, was an international bestseller.

Previous books include Black Earth, which was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the annual prize of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee; and Bloodlands, which won the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Snyder is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.