Iain McGilchrist
Speaker

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London.  He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch.  He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.  He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009),  In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press.

Xiaolu Guo
Speaker

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese British novelist, essayist and filmmaker. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and Costa Award. Her most recent novel is A Lover’s Discourse, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020 and longlisted for Orwell Prize. Named as a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist in 2013, she also directed a dozen films, including How Is Your Fish Today (Sundance) and UFO In Her Eyes (TIFF). Her feature She, A Chinese received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Festival 2009. She had her film retrospectives at London’s Whitechapel Gallery 2019 and Cinematheque Switzerland 2011. She was a visiting professor at Columbia University and Baruch College in New York. She divides her time between London and Berlin.

Rory Stewart
Speaker

Rory Stewart has been an academic, writer, adventurer, politician and diplomat. After a brief time in the Army and the diplomatic service, he walked 6000 miles on a 21 month trek across Asia, was the acting governor of a province in Iraq , established an NGO in Afghanistan and was appointed a Professor at Harvard, and wrote a number of books before entering Parliament. He served as a minister in a number of departments and was a cabinet minister before his bid to be Prime-Minister. He is now President of the non-profit GiveDirectly.

His walk across Afghanistan shortly after the US invasion is described in his award-winning New York Times bestseller, The Places In Between. His books have sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide and have been translated into 13 languages. He has made a number of documentaries and he also co-presents (with Alastair Campbell)  the UK’s leading political podcast  ‘The Rest is Politics’.

Linda Woodhead
Speaker

Linda Woodhead MBE FBA is F.D. Maurice Chair in Moral and Social Theology and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London. She researches religion, spirituality, and values in post-Christian societies. Her most recent books are That Was the Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People (with Andrew Brown, 2016), Gen Z, Explained (with Katz, Ogilvie, Shaw 2021) and Unknowing God: Towards a Post-Abusive Theology (with Peter Harvey, 2022). She is currently researching the way that ‘values’ have become a new religion.