Judges

Hermione Lee is a literary biographer and Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of Oxford, where she was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and founded the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald and Tom Stoppard, critical books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth, and books about life-writing: Body Parts in 2005, a “Very Short Introduction” to Biography in 2009, and, in 2020, a co-edited collection, Lives of Houses.

She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship. In 2023 she was made GBE (Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire) for services to English Literature.

She has judged a number of literary prizes in the past, including the Booker (twice), the Hawthornden Prize (for twelve years), the W.H. Smith Award, the Guardian First Book Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She was a judge for the David Cohen Prize in 1999 when it was awarded to William Trevor.

Tessa Hadley has published eight novels – including The Past, Late in the Day, and Free Love – and four collections of short stories; her latest collection, After the Funeral, came out in paperback in July 2024 and her novella, The Party, was published in November 2024.

She has short stories regularly in the New Yorker, and reviews for the Guardian and the London Review of Books; she was awarded a Windham Campbell prize for Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize in 2016, and the Edge Hill Prize in 2018.

Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World.

Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut novel is Open, Heaven.

Photo credit: Stuart Simpson / Penguin Random House

Maya Jaggi is a writer, critic, cultural journalist and artistic director based in London. She is a contributing art critic to the Financial Times, and was an arts writer and a lead fiction critic for The Guardian for more than a decade, when her work included long-form profiles of a dozen Nobel laureates in literature and cultural figures from Edward Said to Umberto Eco.

She has been a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Journalism, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023 for her independent critical writing on global art and books, which has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Economist, ArtForum, Newsweek, and Le Monde Diplomatique.

She has judged many international literary awards, including as chair of judges of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize, 2024 and 2025, and the Man Asian Literary Prize in Hong Kong.

She has given cultural journalism masterclasses in Ukraine, Georgia, and other post-Soviet countries as an EU Senior Expert and been an Associate Fellow of Warwick University and a DAAD Arts and Media Fellow in Berlin. She holds an honorary doctorate from the Open University for ‘extending the map of international writing,’ and degrees from Oxford University and the London School of Economics.

PHOTO: Ale Di Padova/EBRD.

Ruth Scurr FRSL is a biographer, historian and literary critic. Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (2006), won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009. Her second book, John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015) was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. Her third book, Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows (2021) won the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award for Biography.

She has regularly reviewed both fiction and non-fiction since 1997 and has judged many literary awards including: the Man Booker Prize (2007), the Samuel Johnson Prize (2014), the Baillie Gifford Prize (2023). In 2024 she was elected Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She is a Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.