Chris Jones is a long-time writer of non-fiction, known mainly for his work at Esquire magazine, where he won two National Magazine Awards for feature writing: one for The Things That Carried Him, a story about the return of a soldier’s body from Iraq, and Home, which became the basis for his non-fiction book Out of Orbit. 

He has also written for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and ESPN. His next book, Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies, about the healing powers of soccer, will be published by Penguin Random House in June 2026.  He was also a writer and producer for the Netflix series Away, starring Hilary Swank. 
He’s been a frequent guest at The Power of Storytelling and he’s excited to be back once again. He promises to be funny this time.

Jacqui Banaszynski’s road through life has been guided by the stories she’s been privileged to tell. 

She co-piloted the Goodyear Blimp and once shared a bologna sandwich with a penguin. She followed schoolchildren to a blessing by a pope, and was denounced from the pulpit by a Catholic archbishop for her coverage of the church’s treatment of gays. She waded through cow manure with teen beauty pageant contestants, and through a locker room of naked pro football players. 

She sat with mothers as their babies died, and gay men as their partners died. She also sat through countless civic meetings to help the public understand everything from tax rates to wildfire management. 

After almost 40 years as a reporter and editor in newsrooms, she now teaches student and professional journalists who tell the stories the public still needs. Despite the current climate of mistrust, she has never lost faith in the power of true stories to illuminate our shared humanity – or in the privilege of bearing witness.

Lea Ypi is the Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the LSE and a fellow of the British Academy. A native of Albania, she studied Philosophy and then Literature at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and was a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She is the recipient of many prizes, including the Philip Leverhulme Prize for exceptional research achievement and the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in Political Science. Her book Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History was awarded the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2022, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the Costa Biography Award 2021, and the Gordon Burn Prize 2022, and has been sold in more than 30 languages. She contributes regularly to The Guardian and Financial Times. Her second book Indignity: A Life Reimagined was published in 2025.

Lana Bastašić is a Yugoslav-born writer. She has published fiction, poetry, essays and plays. Her short stories have received numerous regional awards in the Balkans, including the Ulaznica and Zija Dizdarevic. Her first novel, Catch the Rabbit, won the European Union Prize in Literature and the International Latisana Prize in Italy. The book was shortlisted for the Dutch European Award and longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award. It has been translated into more than 20 languages. 
She also published a collection of short stories, Milk Teeth, and a diary titled The Red Suitcase. Bastašić is one of the founders of Escola Bloom literary school in Barcelona.

Elena Stancu is a Romanian journalist who, together with her partner, photographer Cosmin Bumbuț, has been living in a camper van since 2013. From their home on wheels they have traveled across Europe to document the lives of Romanian immigrants, working on what has become the most complex and in-depth project about Romanian migration. Their long-term reporting blends intimate storytelling with a broader analysis of social issues, portraying both the struggles and resilience of Romanian migrants.

Elena has been working as a journalist for 20 years, with a focus on some of the most difficult and overlooked realities of Romanian society: extreme poverty, domestic violence, life in prisons, the drug crisis in hospitals, racism, discrimination, and migration. Before beginning her life of travel with Cosmin, she spent five years at Marie Claire Romania, first as Features Editor and later as Deputy Editor-in-Chief.

She has won several journalism awards and grants, including fellowships from the Pulitzer Center and the Carter Center in the US, and the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence. She was nominated twice for the European Press Prize (2016 and 2023) and in 2025 for the True Story Award.

Alongside Cosmin, Elena has also directed two independent documentaries – The Last Kalderash (2016) and The Residents (2018) – and published the book Acasă, pe drum [At Home on the Road] (Humanitas, 2017), which chronicles the first four years of their life on the road. 

Since 2019, she has been documenting Romanian communities across the continent, from strawberry pickers in Spain and seasonal farm workers in Germany to Romanian doctors in the UK and badanti in Italy – work that will soon appear in a new book. Her stories reveal not only the economic realities of migration, but also the human costs – shame, longing, uprootedness – as well as the ways in which Romanians abroad are reshaping both their host societies and their homeland.

Nathan Thrall is an American writer living in Jerusalem. In 2024, he received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. An international bestseller, it was translated into more than thirty languages, selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a best book of the year by over twenty publications, including The New Yorker, The Economist, and Time. 

He is also the author of The Only Language They Understand. His reporting, essays, and criticism have appeared in the London Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College.

Adam Thomas is a coach, advisor, and founder of Evenly Distributed, where he works with multipotential leaders, creators, and organisations navigating complexity and change. He writes the weekly newsletter Theory of Change and produces videos for his YouTube channel.

For more than twenty years, Adam has worked in the arts, media, and technology sectors. His career includes roles as a nonprofit Executive Director (European Journalism Centre), Chief Product Officer (Storyful), Head of Communications  (Sourcefabric), producer (Transmediale, AV Festival, Dott), and educator. 

He has built, scaled, and sold organisations across nonprofit and commercial domains, raised more than €30 million in philanthropic funding, and received awards for innovation in journalism and technology. His experience spans strategy, organisational design, product development, and leadership across mission-driven and creative environments.

Through coaching, advisory support, and free public resources his current work focuses on supporting multipassionate people to better understand their strengths, work with their varied interests, and develop focus, clarity, and better decision-making. 
Adam also writes and releases ambient music as Preslav Literary School and is a trail runner and passionate conservationist.

András Pethő is co-founder and executive director of Direkt36, an investigative journalism center in Hungary. Direkt36, launched in 2015, is one of the few Hungarian journalism organizations that are not controlled by pro-government forces and other political interest groups. 

During his 20-year-long career, András was a senior editor for leading Hungarian news site Origo, worked for the BBC World Service in London, and was a reporter at the investigative unit of The Washington Post. He has contributed to several international reporting projects, including The Panama Papers and the Pegasus Project. 

He has overseen the production of several investigative documentary films as producer. He was a World Press Institute fellow in 2008, a Humphrey fellow at the University of Maryland in 2012/13, and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2019/20.

Ioana Șopov is an artist and art director who works in game development within Bucharest-based indie game studio Gummycat. After ten years spent in illustration and animation for both advertising and editorial clients such as big brands, magazines and festivals, Ioana pivoted towards the most complex project she’d ever taken on. 

In 2020 she started working on her first game called Bear & Breakfast. The game’s launch in 2022 became a cornerstone moment confirming that her passion for video games and her varied set of skills accrued throughout her career were a perfect match.

Ioana is also the co-founder of VisualPlayground, an NGO which created affordable and exciting visual arts events in Romania with international speakers and trainers.

In 2023 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a moment that changed her life in innumerable ways. Surprisingly, not all of them were bad.

Irina Dumitrescu is a writer, critic, and professor of medieval literature at the University of Bonn. She has long been fascinated by the ways that artistic and intellectual work can shape people and help them thrive, even in challenging times. To this end, she wrote a book on difficult teacher-student relationships in medieval literature for Cambridge University Press, and edited Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi, a collection of essays about the sustaining role of the arts in personal and political crises. She is now working on a book about imperfect people in the Middle Ages for Faber & Faber and Riverhead Books.

Irina is a columnist at the Times Literary Supplement and has co-hosted, with Mary Wellesley, three podcast series at the London Review of Books. She also writes about books, art, and culture more generally for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Apollo Magazine, and The Walrus, among others. Her essays and poems have been published in a wide range of literary journals, and reprinted in Best American Essays 2016, Best Food Writing 2017, Best Canadian Poetry 2026, Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing, Longreads, The Rumpus, The London Magazine, and Scena9. She regularly makes appearances on podcasts and radio, including BBC Radio 4, CBC Ideas, and Deutschlandfunk.
On Substack, Irina writes The Process, a newsletter dedicated to nurturing creative life in the modern world. She has recently begun painting and drawing, and keeps an artist’s notebook on Instagram.