Adam Offord Buxton is an English actor, comedian, podcaster and writer. With the filmmaker Joe Cornish, he is part of the comedy duo Adam and Joe. They presented the Channel 4 television series The Adam and Joe Show (1996–2001) and the BBC Radio 6 Music series Adam and Joe.
Ben Okri is a Nigerian-British poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991, Okri won the Booker Prize with his novel The Famished Road.
The Richard Dawkins Award is an annual prize awarded by the Center for Inquiry (CFI). It was established in 2003 and was initially awarded by the Atheist Alliance of America coordinating with Richard Dawkins and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. In 2019, the award was formally moved to CFI. CFI is a US nonprofit organization that variously claims on its website to promote reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values, or science, reason, and secular values. The award was initially presented by the Atheist Alliance of America to honor an "outstanding atheist", who taught or advocated scientific knowledge and acceptance of nontheism, and raised public awareness. The award is currently presented by the Center for Inquiry to individual associated with science, scholarship, education, or entertainment, and who "publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead." They state that the recipient must be approved by Dawkins himself.
Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov is a Russian politician and businessman. He was First Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration from 1999 to 2011, during which time he was often viewed as the main ideologist of the Kremlin who proposed and implemented the concept of sovereign democracy in Russia. From December 2011 until May 2013, Surkov served as the Russian Federation's Deputy Prime Minister. After his resignation, Surkov returned to the Presidential Executive Office and became a personal adviser of Vladimir Putin on relationships with Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ukraine. He was removed from this duty by presidential order in February 2020.
Tobias Simpson Menzies is an English stage, television and film actor. He is known for playing Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in the third and fourth seasons of Netflix's series The Crown, for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series and received Golden Globe and British Academy Television Award nominations. Menzies also played Frank and Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall in STARZ's Outlander, for which he received a Golden Globe Award nomination, in addition to his roles as Brutus in HBO's Rome and Edmure Tully in HBO's Game of Thrones.
John Kampfner is a British author, broadcaster and commentator. He is now an Executive Director at Chatham House, leading its UK in the World initiative. His sixth book Why The Germans Do It Better, Notes From A Grown-Up Country, was published in 2020 and chosen as one of the books of the year in 2020 and 2021 in a number of newspapers. He is currently working on a new book about Berlin.
The Orwell Prize, based at University College London, is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" ; between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
Gordon Burn was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction.
Andrea Wulf is a German-British historian and writer who has written books, newspaper articles and book reviews.
Anthony John McGowan is an English author of books for children, teenagers and adults. He is the winner of the 2020 CILIP Carnegie Medal for Lark.
Ian Cobain is a British journalist. Cobain is best known for his investigative journalism into human rights abuses committed by the British government post-9/11, the secrecy surrounding the British state and the legacy of the Northern Ireland's Troubles.
Peter Pomerantsev is a Soviet-born British journalist, author and TV producer. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, where he co-directs the Arena program. He is also an associate editor at Coda Media, a position he has held since at least 2015. Pomerantsev has written two books about Russian disinformation and propaganda: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014) and This Is Not Propaganda (2019).
China Global Television Network (CGTN) is the international division of state media outlet China Central Television (CCTV), headquartered in Beijing, China. CGTN broadcasts six news and general interest channels in six languages. CGTN is registered under the State Council of the People's Republic of China and is under the control of the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping described CGTN's goal as being to "tell China's story well."
Nesrine Malik is a Sudanese-born journalist and author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent. Based in London, Malik is a columnist for The Guardian and serves as a panellist on the BBC's weekly news discussion programme Dateline London.
Eva Karene Bartlett is an American Canadian activist, commentator, and blogger who has propagated conspiracy theories in connection to the Syrian civil war, most notably the disproven allegation that the White Helmets stage rescues and "recycle" children in its videos.
The Fifth Risk is a 2018 non-fiction book by Michael Lewis that examines the transition and political appointments of the Donald Trump presidency, especially with respect to three government agencies: the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Commerce. The book spent fourteen weeks on The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list. A lengthy excerpt from the book was published twice by The Guardian, using a quote from a top adviser to Trump in the title.
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984 is a book-length history of George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four written by Dorian Lynskey and published by Doubleday in 2019.
Timothy Pleydell-Bouverie is a British historian and former political journalist at Channel 4 News.
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them is a 2018 nonfiction book by Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Stanley, whose parents were refugees of Nazi Germany, describes strategies employed by fascist regimes, which includes normalizing the "intolerable". His book is part of a "wave of articles, books and op-eds" that warn of the "return of fascism", features of which are already evident, according to Stanley, in the politics of the United States, the Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and Hungary. The book was reissued in 2020 with a new preface in which Stanley describes how global events have substantiated his concern that fascist rhetoric is showing up in politics and policies around the world.
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia is a 2014 book by Peter Pomerantsev about 21st century Russian history.
