Meet the judges for 2017
Sir Peter Bazalgette
Sir Peter Bazalgette (Chair) is Chairman, ITV and is currently leading an independent review into the UK’s creative industries as part of the Government’s new Industrial Strategy. Peter is also Chair of HM Government’s Holocaust Memorial Foundation and serves on the Advisory Boards of BBH and YouGov.
From 2013 until 2017 he was Chair of Arts Council England. He is the former President of the Royal Television Society and Chief Creative Officer of Endemol where he personally devised several internationally successful formats such as Ready Steady Cook and Ground Force. Peter’s book about the business of TV formats, Billion Dollar Game, was published in 2005, and in January 2017 he published The Empathy Instinct.
Anjana Ahuja
Anjana Ahuja is a freelance science journalist and a Contributing Writer at the Financial Times, where she is best known for her regular opinion columns. She has also contributed to Newsnight and made documentaries for BBC Radio 4. Prior to that, she was a Staff Writer at The Times for 16 years.
In 2010, Anjana co-authored Selected, a book on the evolution of human leadership. She is a current trustee of the charity Sense about Science and a former school governor. She has a PhD in space physics from Imperial College London.
Ian Bostridge
Ian Bostridge’s international recital career has taken him to the Salzburg, Edinburgh, Munich, Vienna, Aldeburgh and Schwarzenberg Schubertiade Festivals and to the main stages of Carnegie Hall, New York and La Scala, Milan. He has held artistic residencies at the Vienna Konzerthaus and Schwarzenberg Schubertiade (2003/2004), a Carte-Blanche series with Thomas Quasthoff at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw (2004/2005), a Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall (2005/2006), the Barbican, London (2008), the Luxembourg Philharmonie (2010/2011), the Wigmore Hall (2011/12) and Hamburg Laeiszhalle (2012/2013).
His recordings have won all the major international record prizes and been nominated for 15 Grammys.
Sarah Churchwell
Sarah Churchwell is Professorial Fellow in American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Her literary journalism has appeared widely, and she comments regularly on arts, culture, and politics for television and radio, where appearances include Question Time, Newsnight, and The Review Show. She has judged many literary prizes, including the 2014 Man Booker Prize, and was a co-winner of the 2015 Eccles British Library Writer’s Award. She is currently writing a book about Henry James.
Razia Iqbal
Razia Iqbal is one of the main presenters of Newshour, the flagship news and current affairs programme on BBC World Service. She also regularly presents The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4. She was the BBC's arts correspondent for a decade, covering arts and culture for radio and television news. She also presented Talking Books on BBC World TV: an in depth interview programme with leading writers.
Razia has been a journalist with the BBC for nearly three decades, and has worked as a political reporter and as a foreign correspondent in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Most recently, she has covered the 2016 Presidential campaign in the US; the Turkish elections and travelled in India and Pakistan making programmes for radio and television. She was born in Kampala, Uganda and moved to London as a child.