Alan Johnson was born in May 1950. He is a British Labour Party politician who served as Home Secretary from June 2009 to May 2010. Before that, he filled a wide variety of cabinet positions in both the Blair and Brown governments, including Health Secretary and Education Secretary. Until 20 January 2011 he was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Alan Johnson has been the Member of Parliament for Hull West and Hessle since 1997.

Marcus du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In 2008 he was appointed to the University’s prestigious professorship as the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, a post previously held by Richard Dawkins. In 2009 The Royal Society awarded him the Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science to the public, and in 2010 he received an OBE from the Queen for his services to science.   He is the author of The Music of the Primes, Finding Moonshine and The Number Mysteries. He has presented numerous programmes on television and radio, including the internationally acclaimed BBC series The Story of Maths and the comedy maths show The School of Hard Sums with Dara Ó Briain. He lives in London with his wife and three children. His latest book is What We Cannot Know.

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including Pax and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare, Deborah's early novels, Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography and The Unloved have just been reprinted by Penguin. Her new acclaimed autobiographical essay, Things I Don't Want to Know, a response to Orwell's essay, Why I Write, was described by The Guardian as "original, unmissable, like chancing upon an oasis. The writing is of such quality that you want to drink it slowly." It is now out in paperback, also published by Penguin. In 2012 Deborah was nominated for the Booker Prize for her novel Swimming Home. She has always written across a number of art forms, theatre, performance, visual art and was AHRB Fellow at the Royal College of Art from 2006-9.  

Claire Messud is the author of five novels and a book of novellas. Her novel The Emperor's Children was a New York Times Best Book of the Year and long-listed for the Man-Booker Prize. An international bestseller, it was translated into over 20 languages. She writes articles and reviews for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. She lives in Massachusetts, USA with her family. Her latest work is The Woman Upstairs and which has been published to wide acclaim.

Dr R. Beau Lotto, is a neuroscientist and Director of Lottolab at University College London, co-Director of the branding Neuro-Design lab Beautiful Mind LTD and CEO of the Silicon Valley start-up called Ripples INC. He has been conducting and presenting research on human perception for more than 25 years. The approach of 'science as experience' is winning an ever-wider public audience: being recently awarded the Josef Albers Prize for ‘Disruptive Innovation’ at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York; two BBC Horizon programmes, National Geographic’s Brain Games, two main-stage TEDs, a Google Zeitgeist. He was the first scientist to exhibit at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank; created the first public perception lab at the London Science Museum, and worked to develop the Hummingbird Institute in Chile.