Events

Bridget Kendall has been the BBC diplomatic correspondent since 1998.  Before that she was a foreign correspondent in Moscow (1989-94) and in Washington (1994-98).  She was the first woman to win the James Cameron Award for distinguished Journalism (1992), and in 1994 she was made an MBE.

NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of the forthcoming novel We Need New Names. Her stories have won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011 and shortlisted for the J.M. Coetzee - judged 2009 SA PEN Studzinsi Award.  NoViolet was born and raised in Zimbabwe.  She earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship, and most recently, a lecturer of English. She is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. 

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He is a member of the Indian government's National Security Advisory Board and the World Economic Forum's Global Governance Council. He has taught at Harvard, Jawaharlal Nehru University and New York University School of Law, and is an editorial consultant and columnist for the Indian Express. In 2011, he was awarded the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences – Political Science and International Relations.

Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa. He won the Booker Prize in 1991 for his novel The Famished Road. He is a vice-president of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum.