Speakers

Sarah Churchwell is Professor in American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she directs the Being Human Festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities. She is the author of The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and The Lies America Tells; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby; Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream; and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, most recently adapted into a 2022 CNN/BBC series narrated by Jessica Chastain.

Her journalism has appeared widely in international newspapers and periodicals, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian and many others, focusing especially upon American culture, history, and politics. She has also frequently contributed to television, documentary film, and radio, with appearances including Question Time, Newsnight, Sky News, BBC Breakfast and numerous appearances across all channels. She was co-winner of the 2015 Eccles British Library Writer’s Award, named by Prospect magazine one of the world’s Top Fifty Thinkers in 2020, and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2021.

Jane Coyle is an award-winning writer, arts journalist and critic. Born and raised in Wales, she has home bases in Northern Ireland and Brittany. She studied at the Sorbonne and is a graduate of the University of Leicester. She began her professional career at the London publishing house of Faber & Faber, where she worked, in an editorial capacity, with Lawrence Durrell and other distinguished writers. For many years, she has been a regular critic and feature writer for The Stage and The Irish Times and is a member of the judging panel for the UK Theatre Awards. She worked in television production for twenty years and has written countless scripts for television and radio. She has written three feature-length screenplays, a children’s radio drama and six stage plays, the most recent of which (After Melissa) was inspired by Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet.

She is co-librettist for the opera adaptation of her play The Suitcase, which completed a five-week run at Vienna’s English Theatre in 2024, and is currently writing its screenplay. Her dramatic monologue Farm Girl was read in Vienna and Ljubljana earlier this year and her play Beckett-inspired play Both Sides received its European premiere in Paris a year ago. She has just completed Facing the Planet, a words and pictures project with abstract artist Tessa Coe. A selection of her features and reviews, covering four decades of theatre in Northern Ireland, is to be published in June 2026 by Yellow House Publishing, under the title A Better Locksmith. She is a co-founder and director of the production company Powerstone.

David Evan Giles is an Australian Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and has written, produced and directed feature films and festival-winning short films, starring Glenn Close, Naomi Watts, Cate Blanchett and, for those mature enough to remember her luminous performances in The Draughtman’s Contract and Picnic At Hanging Rock, Anne Louise Lambert. He has written articles and short stories for publications in the UK and Australia. David is also a published poet and is honoured to participate in this wonderful festival in the company of such an array of talented and deeply knowledgeable speakers.

David Harsent has published thirteen volumes of poetry. Legion won the Forward Prize. Night won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A Broken Man in Flower, Harsent’s versions of poems written by Yannis Ritsos while in prison camps and under house arrest, was published by Bloodaxe in 2023. A new collection, Skin, came from Faber in March 2024. More recently, Harsent has published two pamphlets: The Tanglewood Sonnets, and – earlier this year – The Wound, his versions of poems by C. P. Cavafy. A new collection is in preparation.

Harsent writes for the opera stage and has collaborated with several composers, though most often with Harrison Birtwistle. Birtwistle/Harsent operas, and their pieces for the concert stage, have been performed at major venues worldwide, including the Royal Opera House, the Salzburg Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Southbank Centre, the Concertgebouw and Carnegie Hall.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor Emeritus at the University of Roehampton.

Julian Hoffman is a writer and naturalist, and is the author of Irreplaceable, The Small Heart of Things and Notes from Near and Far, his blog on the nature of place. Born in northeast England, he grew up in Ontario and moved with his wife in 2000 to a mountain village beside the Prespa Lakes in northwestern Greece, a trans-boundary Balkan park whose lake basin is shared with Albania and North Macedonia. Home to a remarkably rich range of people, birds, wild flowers, languages, mammals and habitats, including the world's largest colony of Dalmatian pelicans, Prespa is a place that has taught Julian a great deal about our complex yet indelible connections to landscape and the natural world.

Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places, celebrates those imperilled places that are increasingly vanishing from the world, exploring treasured woodlands, prairies, marshlands, urban allotments and coral reefs, along with the many species under threat in them. Just as importantly though, it’s a book about resistance to loss and the countless stories of local communities and conservationists as they set about to protect and preserve what is not only of crucial importance to the fabric of human life but irreplaceable as well. Irreplaceable was a Royal Geographical Society Book of the Year and the Highly Commended Finalist for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation.

Dr Simon Karythis is a Corfiot ecologist, who after spending his formative years on the island, moved to theUK where he studied Zoology as an undergrad, before working in related industries for nearly a decade. After spending three years working at a marine ecology research centre in Chile, where he developed a passion for understanding the complexities of ocean systems, he returned to the UK to complete his postgraduate studies. Attending Bangor University, he first completed a MSc in Marine Ecology with a focus on how species interact with each other and their environment, he then completed his PhD with a similar focus. His postdoctoral research focused on the impacts of non-native species on invaded environments and the potential for human structures to facilitate their negative impacts. He has a broad understanding of the mechanisms that underpin many ecological processes which informs his passion for the protection and conservation of the environment around Corfu and the broader Ionian.

Stavros Katsios is Professor of International Economic Relations and International Economic Crime at the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece and Director of the Laboratory for Geocultural Analyses (Geolab), Chair Holder of the UNESCO Chair on Threats to Cultural Heritage and Cultural Heritage-related Activities at the Ionian University Coordinator of the Yellow Tourism Research Consortium and Deputy Head of the Department of Foreign Languages Translation and Interpreting. He has studied law at the “Albertus Magnus” University, Cologne, at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. (scholarship for attending courses in International Law and Policy) and at the Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece.

David Olusoga OBE is a British historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and filmmaker. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester, considered an expert on military history, empire, race and slavery. David has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to The One Show and The Guardian and his series of films A House Through Time introduced a cohort of new viewers to review and consider their own neighbourhood's past in a human and intimate way.

David has been included in Powerlist, a ranking of the most influential Black Britons and in the 2021 edition he made the Top 10 most influential, ranking eighth. In November 2020, the BBC announced that it had commissioned Barack Obama Talks To David Olusoga, a special programme in which Barack Obama discussed the first volume of his presidential memoirs, A Promised Land.

Alex Preston is the prize-winning author of four novels, most recently the critically acclaimed Winchelsea. Alex appears regularly on BBC Radio and television. He writes for The Telegraph, Harper’s Bazaar and The Economist as well as for the Observer’s New Review. Alex nurtures a deep and abiding love of Greece and Corfu. He is a long-distance runner and swimmer and traversed the Hellespont as part of the Year of Troy celebrations in 2018 and is planning to undertake the Albania to Corfu swim as soon as we can sign him up. His work is published in Greek by Papadopoulos Publishing and Alex has written a regular monthly column for Epsilon Magazine in Athens.

Born in South Wales, Nicola Rayner is a novelist and dance writer based in London. She is the author of The Girl Before You, which was picked by the Observer as a debut to look out for in 2019, optioned for television and translated into multiple languages. Her second novel, You and Me, was published by Avon, HarperCollins, in 2020. In her day job as a journalist, Nicola has written about dance for almost two decades, cutting her teeth on the tango section of Time Out Buenos Aires. She edited the magazine Dance Today from 2010 to 2015 and worked as assistant editor of Dancing Times, the UK’s leading dance publication, from 2019 until 2022. She continues to dance everything from ballroom to breakdance, with varying degrees of finesse. Her latest novel, The Paris Dancer, was published to rave reviews in 2025.

Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, writer and broadcaster. He presents BBC Radio 4’s Start The Week, and the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry. He is the author of seven books, mostly about evolution, genetics and history, race and eugenics, including the bestselling How to Argue With a Racist which is neither controversial nor pugnacious and anyone who disagrees can fight him. His latest is a children’s book called Where Are You Really From?, about human evolution and race and genealogy and that sort of thing. Adam was recently bestowed the Royal Society David Attenborough Award for his contribution to strengthening public confidence in science.