Senior Programme Manager (Festivals & Events) at New Writing North and Director of Durham Book Festival

Rebecca Wilkie has twenty years of experience working in the literature sector. She leads on New Writing North’s festivals and events programme, including the Durham Book Festival which takes place each October, the Gordon Burn Prize and a growing programme of literature activity in Newcastle upon Tyne.  Rebecca joined New Writing North in 2012 having previously worked for national reading charity Book Trust and at literary agency The Agency (London) Ltd. She has a BA in English from University College London and an MLitt in English (specialising in Children’s Literature) from Newcastle University.

political editor, BBC North East and Cumbria

Richard is the BBC’s Political Editor for the North East and Cumbria. He presents Politics North on BBC1 each Sunday, and reports on politics for BBC’s Look North, local radio and online. He is a winner of the Royal Television Society Presenter of the Year for the North East and Border region. He’s been a journalist for more than 30 years and enjoys the cut and thrust of debate with the region’s MPs.

Follow Richard on Twitter @BBCRichardMoss

archivist, Academy of Ideas

Leo studied politics for his A Levels and has maintained a keen interest in the subject ever since. He currently works for the Academy of Ideas as an archivist, cataloguing and organising audio and video recordings of the Battle of Ideas festival sessions as well as helping to organise and set up the festival at Church House.

In addition, he has been involved with the Living Freedom and Debating Matters organisations for Ideas Matter, projects which encourage younger students to engage with the important issues of the day and to value the importance of debate and discussion in the public sphere.

barrister, Radcliffe Chambers; writer on law, Spectator

Steven is a lawyer who loves law. He is an experienced commercial barrister in big money cases in court and in arbitration; mostly in London but also around the world. That requires him to have a broad and deep understanding of the law. That made him uniquely placed, in 2020, to become the writer on law for the Spectator – where he’s covered a wide area of law. His greatest achievement was spotting, in a German case about the bond markets, the germ of what has become the EU Rule of Law Crisis (which is still ongoing).

He is a passionate scholar of UK constitutional law. He published the fact that the nature of international law in the UK was being misunderstood – and was vindicated a year later by the Supreme Court. He believes the line between what is law and what is politics is not mere philosophy, he thinks it is law and part of our constitution – but that it too, has fallen into misunderstanding.

Follow Steven on Twitter @sbarrettBar

dancer, writer, and broadcaster; board member of the Fondation en faveur de l’art choreographique in Lausanne and of the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation; formerly creative director, Royal Opera House and director of Cultural Partnerships, King’s College London

Deborah Bull danced with The Royal Ballet for 20 years, performing leading roles in the UK and around the world, before becoming creative director, the Royal Opera House. In this role, over the following decade, she developed the ROH2 programme as well as the Royal Opera House Big Screen Live Relays and produced the ROH 2012 Olympic Programming.

In 2012, she joined King’s College London, first as director, Cultural Partnerships and most recently as vice president, Communities & National Engagement. In 2022, she left the university to focus on her work in the House of Lords where, as Baroness Bull, she acts as a deputy speaker, sits on the EU/UK Parliamentary Partnerships Assembly and will chair the Expert Advisory Panel for the government’s forthcoming Cultural Education plan.

She has written and presented a wide range of work for television and radio, including the award winning The Dancer’s Body, and is the author of four books. She has served on the boards of South Bank Centre, Arts Council England, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, as a governor of the BBC and as a judge for the 2010 Booker Prize.

Currently, she is a board member of the Fondation en faveur de l’art choreographique in Lausanne and of the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation. She has received honorary doctorates from Derby University, Sheffield Hallam University, the Open University, Kent University and Lincoln University and was awarded a CBE for her contribution to the arts in 1998.

chair, Generating Genius; chairman, The Sewell Report; former chair, Race and Ethnic Disparities Commission, Conservative peer

Tony is chair of the leading science and technology charity Generating Genius. He was born in London of Jamaican immigrants. He worked as a secondary school teacher in some of London’s most challenging schools. During this period, he worked on his PhD, which looked at the link between black masculinities in the UK and school achievement. This became a seminal work and led to several key publications.

Tony helped with the transformation of education in Hackney as part of the team that set up the Learning Trust and the iconic Mossbourne school. The work in Hackney had national significance, given that it was the flagship of the Academy movement which transformed the education landscape.

It was after this that Tony set up his ground-breaking charity Generating Genuis, which has successfully given thousands of young people from poor backgrounds the opportunity to study science and technology at top universities. Recently, he led former Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s inquiry into London education. This resulted in the London Schools Excellence Fund, a programme that helped London schools to achieve the top grades for students in the capital. He was awarded a CBE for his work in education.

In 2021, while chairing the Race and Ethnic Disparities, Commission, Tony published The Sewell Report which investigated race and ethnic disparities in the UK. Tony has published widely and hopes to finish his great ambition to be a farmer and an expert in Scottish Medieval poetry.

human rights lawyer and campaigner, Labour Peer

Shami Chakrabarti (Baroness Chakrabarti CBE PC) is a human rights lawyer and campaigner, Labour Peer and was Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales from September 2016 to April 2020. She was the Director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) from 2003 to 2016 and is the Chair of London’s Gate Theatre.

She was a panelist on the Leveson Inquiry into media culture, ethics and practice after the phone-hacking scandal in 2011/12 and one of an international group who carried the Olympic flag at the opening of the London games in 2012.

She has written and broadcast widely and is the author of two books; “On Liberty” (2014) and “Of Women” (2017). Both are published by Penguin, Allen Lane who are due to publish her third book in 2024.

politician, scientist, engineer, Liberal Democrat peer

Chris Fox became a peer in 2014, he also leads for the Liberal Democrats on Business and Industrial Strategy. 

He sat on the Science and Technology Select Committee and then the Economic Affairs Committee for four years. He is now a member of the International Agreements Committee.

Chris is also Vice President of the German British Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and an Executive member of the British American Parliamentary Group

Between 2009 and 2011 he was Chief Executive of the Liberal Democrats.

He has served on the senior executive teams of three FTSE 100 companies, latterly between 2012 and 2017 on the executive board of global aerospace and automotive company GKN plc.

Originally a scientist, Chris went to Imperial College, gaining a BSc in Chemistry. On graduation, he worked as a petroleum industry engineer. Following a year in the nuclear industry, in December 1998 he joined food ingredients manufacturer Tate & Lyle PLC where he served for nearly seven years. After this he was Director of Group Communications with diversified engineer Smiths Group.

retired captain of Berlin Fire Brigade

Manfred Topfstädt is a retired captain of Berlin Fire Brigade and the commander of various fire stations. He has been the responsible clerk in preventative fire protection and in charge of control and monitoring of public events in Berlin since 2012.

Manfred is also a retired instructor in the rescue service at the Berlin Fire Brigade and responsible for the revision of the 2009 Operational Service Handbook of the Berlin Fire Department.

Manfred is also three-time world champion in road racing for firefighters!

mathematician, economist, philosopher and entrepreneur; founder of Kairós Institute

Julian Arndts is a mathematician, economist, philosopher and entrepreneur. He is founder of Kairós, an institute doing research on the economics and philosophy of artificial intelligence and prediction markets. He teaches mathematical economics for graduate students at BiTS University, as part of the Master’s program in Entrepreneurial Economics, and he worked as an academic supervisor at Cambridge

University. Furthermore, he has co-founded various summer universities, such as Nexus Academy, which builds bridges between disciplines as diverse as philosophy, economics, history, psychology, physics and mathematics. He is a frequent speaker, giving talks on artificial intelligence, the philosophy of time, monetary theory, and the history of economic thought.”