Katie Kitamura (Chair of the Bukhman International Booker Prize 2027)

Katie Kitamura is the author of five novels. Audition was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and was one of President Obama’s Favourite Books of 2025. It was also a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Carol Shields Prize. It is being adapted for film by director Lulu Wang, with Lucy Liu and Charles Melton starring.  

Her novel Intimacies was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was one of President Obama’s Favourite Books of 2021. In France, it won the Prix Littéraire Lucien Barrière, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Héroine, and was longlisted for the Prix Fragonard. A Separation (2017) was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and longlisted for the Prix Meilleur Roman Points; it was also a New York Times Notable Book. It is being adapted for film by director Jonas Carpignano. 

Kitamura’s two previous novels, Gone to the Forest (2013) and The Longshot (2009), were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Kitamura is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize. She was the 2025 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library, and has received fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena and Jan Michalski Foundations.  Her work has been translated into 29 languages. She has written for publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, and Frieze, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University. 

Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia and brought up in the Belgian Ardennes. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days, about the fall of communism in Romania, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves, was published in 2019 and won the Encore Prize. He is also the author of three books of poetry, the most recent being Blood Feather (2023); a memoir, Other People’s Countries; a book about Oxford, the city behind the university (Real Oxford, 2021); and several books on French literature, including works on modern French theatre and on politics and poetry in fin de siècle France. His most recent book is Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines (2025). 

McGuinness has translated from French (Stéphane Mallarmé, Hélène Dorion, Guillaume Apollinaire), Spanish (Jorge Manrique) and Catalan (Andreu Vidal). His recent translation, with Stephen Romer, of Gilles Ortlieb’s Selected Poems, won the 2025 Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation. 

McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Caleb Azumah Nelson

Caleb Azumah Nelson is a British-Ghanaian writer and filmmaker, living in South-East London. His debut novel, Open Water, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller, won the Costa First Novel Award 2021 and Debut Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2022. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year 2021 and selected as a Waterstones Paperback of the Month in 2022. Nelson’s second novel, Small Worlds, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the 2024 Dylan Thomas Prize. He was selected as a National Book Foundation ‘5 under 35’ honoree by Brit Bennett. 

The TV adaption of Open Water, an eight-part series for which Nelson is the lead writer, director and executive producer, is currently in production and will air on BBC One in 2027. He is also working on an original feature, The Last Stop, with Heyday and Film4. His short film Pray, starring David Jonsson, premiered at Locarno Film Festival and has since been shown at numerous festivals, including London Film Festival. 

Olga Ravn

Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. In Danish, she has published four novels, two poetry collections and an artist’s book. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021 and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award and the Dublin Literary Award. It has been published in 26 territories. 
  
Her novel My Work won the Politiken’s Literature Prize in 2021 and led to changes in Denmark’s maternity laws. It was published in English in September 2023 to great critical acclaim in a translation by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. 

Ravn’s most recent novel, The Wax Child, was published in English in 2025 in a translation by Martin Aitken. It was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. The novel prompted the Telegraph to call her ‘the strangest – and best – young novelist in Europe’ and is being published in 20 territories. 
 
As a translator, Ravn has translated Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, among others, into Danish. As an editor she played a central role in the relaunch of Tove Ditlevesen’s work. In addition, she has written shorter pieces for the New Yorker, The Paris Review and Granta. She lives in Copenhagen. 

Tessa Thompson

Tessa Thompson is an award-winning actress with an extensive and diverse history of working across film, television and stage. In 2019, she featured on the cover of Time magazine as a ‘Next Generation Leader’. In 2020 she cemented her status as a formidable producer with the launch of her production company, Viva Maude.  

Thompson has starred in a number of films and TV series adapted by or inspired by literature, including His & Hers, released on Netflix earlier this year and adapted from Alice Feeney’s novel of the same name; Nia DaCosta’s film Hedda, inspired by Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress; and Rebecca Hall’s film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s classic novel, Passing. All three were produced or executive produced by Thompson. 

In April this year Thompson made her Broadway debut opposite Adrien Brody in The Fear of 13, written by Lindsey Ferrentino and directed by David Cromer. The play, based on a 2015 documentary, had its world premiere at the Donmar Warehouse in London and tells the true story of Nick Yarris, who spent more than two decades on death row before being exonerated by DNA evidence.  

In 2017 Thompson originated the role of Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok opposite Chris Hemsworth. The Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster, directed by Taika Waititi, grossed over $800 million worldwide. She reprised the role in the fourth Thor instalment five years later. She and Hemsworth collaborated again when she played Agent M in Men in Black: International. Thompson has also starred in all three instalments of the Creed trilogy, opposite Michael B Jordan, and as Charlotte Hale in the Emmy-nominated hit HBO drama series Westworld. Executive produced by J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan, and inspired by writer-director Michael Crichton’s 1973 feature of the same name, the series garnered a total of 43 Emmy nominations from its first and second seasons combined. 

Thompson’s numerous other notable performances include roles in Alex Garland’s Annihilation and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, the voicing of the titular character in Disney’s live-action re-imagining of Lady and the Tramp, and her portrait of civil rights activist Diane Nash in Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated film Selma, produced by Brad Pitt and Oprah Winfrey. 

Thompson is set to star in the upcoming suburban thriller series Next Door, created by Sam Boyd and A24 and due to air on Netflix. Her production company, Viva Maude, currently boasts a wide-ranging slate of over twenty feature films and television projects in various genres, encompassing narrative, documentary, and unscripted content. She and Viva Maude have joined as executive producers on Brittany Shyne’s documentary, Seeds, which won the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize in 2025. Seeds showcases a portrait of Black generational farmers in the American South, and has been selected for the shortlist for the 98th Annual Academy Awards.