Dr Caroline Campbell is Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Previously, she was Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery. A specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, her interests range from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. During her time at the National Gallery, she curated the exhibitions ‘Mantegna and Bellini’, ‘Building the Picture’ and ‘Duccio | Caro’ among others.

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir ‘The Return’ won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, Frances Prix du Livre Etranger Inter & Le Journal du Dimanche and Germany's Geschwister Scholl Prize, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, the Costa Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. He is also the author of the novels ‘In the Country of Men’, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, ‘Anatomy of a Disappearance’, ‘A Month in Siena’, and his most recent novel ‘My Friends’. Matar is a Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.