This year's panel of judges for the British Academy Book Prize boasts a range of academics and experts in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.
Formerly editor-at-large at The Guardian, Gary has written seven books, most recently Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance (Faber, 2025). Winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism and the 2025 Robert. B. Silvers Prize for Journalism, he has written for the New York Review of Books, Granta, GQ and New Statesman, among others, and made radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit. His fifth book, Another Day in the Death of America, won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize from Columbia School of Journalism and Nieman Foundation.
Professor Shadreck Chirikure applies scientific methods to study ancient materials and technologies in their socio-cultural contexts. He uses results of discoveries in the archive, field and laboratory to develop new understandings of technology, mobility, knowledge and economy to tackle global challenges such as inequality, sustainability and responses to colonialism.
His recent book "Great Zimbabwe: Reclaiming a "Confiscated" Past', (Routledge, 2020) combines science with decolonial theory to develop locally centred understandings of everyday life and innovations in Great Zimbabwe.
Chirikure is currently working on a supra national project exploring the mobility of people and elements of their lives such as crops, domestic animals, cosmology and technology in nine southern African countries. He is writing a major book on cosmology and the history of human material relations in AfroEurasia.
After a long career as a BBC foreign correspondent, Bridget Kendall was appointed the first female Master of Peterhouse, the University of Cambridge’s oldest College, in 2016, serving until 2023. She also served as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge 2020-2023.
From 2008-2023, she hosted the weekly discussion programme on new ideas and research for the BBC, The Forum, presenting the programme from all over the world, from Beijing to South Africa, from New York to New Zealand, with venues including the British Museum, the Sydney Opera House and CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
Educated at Oxford and Harvard as well as two Russian Universities, she joined the BBC in 1983 and became BBC Moscow's correspondent in 1989, covering the collapse of the Soviet Union. She served five years as BBC Washington's correspondent and 17 years in the senior role of BBC Diplomatic Correspondent. Her book 'The Cold War; a New Oral History' explores the decades long conflict through eye witness accounts.
Her awards and honours include the James Cameron Award for distinguished journalism and an MBE for services to journalism. She holds Honorary Doctorates from St Andrew’s, Exeter, York, and the Central University of Birmingham. She is an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse as well as two Oxford Colleges – Lady Margaret Hall and St Antony’s. She is an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy.
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University.
He has published seven books and around sixty papers, primarily on Indian and comparative philosophy and religion. His work has covered metaphysics and epistemology, theories of consciousness, classical Indian approaches to liberation, the nature of the self, conceptions off the divine, and bodily phenomenology. He has also written on political theory, international relations, premodern and contemporary Hindu life, and gender in Hindu devotional thought.
His 2014 'Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in two Gita Commentaries' won the Best Book Prize 2011-15 of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. His most recent book is the 2018 'Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India'. He is currently working on a philosophical anthropology of emotions. He is a Fellow of the Dalai Lama’s Mind & Life Institute, and worked on Hindu-Christian relations in 2010-12 with the then Archbishop of Canterbury.
Ritula Shah is a journalist and broadcaster with one of the most recognisable voices on speech radio.
Ritula was the lead presenter of the news and current affairs programme 'The World Tonight', on BBC Radio 4 for 15 years. She is also an experienced panel chair, including on the BBC’s weekly panel discussion show, 'Any Questions?' and 'The Real Story' on BBC World Service. She regularly leads major public debates for universities and think tanks.
Ritula has covered the biggest stories of the last three decades, from the break-up of the Soviet Union to Brexit. She reported from New York after the 9/11 attacks, and has discussed everything from the rise of populism to the flaws of cryptocurrencies with senior politicians and policy makers. She has covered numerous elections world-wide.
Indulging her lifelong passion for the arts, Ritula currently presents a daily show on Classic FM.
Outside broadcasting, Ritula sits on the advisory board of the Royal United Services Institute, the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank. She is also a trustee of the Institute of International Visual Arts known as iniva, and an ambassador for the British Asian Trust.
In the early stages of the review process, the judges are supported by the First Readers Panel. Comprised of Fellows of the British Academy and researchers the Academy has funded, the First Readers Panel use their knowledge, publishing expertise, passion for reading and enthusiasm for literary non-fiction to read and review the books submitted to the Prize, providing a report for the judges to focus their activity.
Johanna Amaya-Panche is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Politics. Her research examines how international actors interact with local civilian collective action in post-conflict peacebuilding, emphasising the roles of multiculturalism, gender, and ethnicity. This work is informed by extensive fieldwork and personal experiences in conflict-affected regions.
Dr Amaya-Panche was awarded a British Academy Talent Development Award (2025).
Henrique Carvalho is Professor of Law and co-Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of 'The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law' (2017, Oxford University Press) and the co-author, with Anastasia Chamberlen, of 'Questioning Punishment' (2024, Routledge).
Professor Carvalho was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2025-2026).
Darren Cook is a Research Fellow in Natural Language Processing at the Violence and Society Centre (City St George's). Their background is in data science, computational social science, and digital humanities.
Dr Cook was awarded a British Academy Talent Development Award (2025).
Sarah Dustagheer is Reader in Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent and Head of the School of Humanities. Her books include 'Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses' and 'Shakespeare and London: A Dictionary'. Sarah’s current project is a history of Shakespeare and the British Empire, funded by a British Academy Fellowship.
Dr Dustagheer was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2025-2026).
Leigh Gardner is an economic historian whose work focuses on the economic and financial history of Sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested understanding how the capacities of African states changed over time, and in bringing Africa into comparative research in global economic history.
Professor Gardner was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2025-2026).
Katy Gardner is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is the author of five works of non-fiction, which focus on Bangladesh, development and migration. She has also published three novels, including the best seller, 'Losing Gemma' (Michael Joseph, 2002).
Katy was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2024.
Claire Langhamer is Director of the Institute of Historical Research and Professor of Modern History at the University of London. She currently works on feeling, everyday experience, subjectivity and temporality and has a particular interest in the Mass Observation Archive. She is writing a book about Feelings at Work.
Professor Langhamer was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2025.
Dr Amber Murrey is an Associate Professor of Political Geography at the University of Oxford. She is Editor-in-Chief of the African Geographical Review, a current British Academy/ Wolfson Fellow, and a recipient of two BA Writing Workshop Awards for work with the University of Buea (Cameroon) and Addis Ababa University.
Dr Murrey was awarded a British Academy / Wolfson Fellowship (2024-2026).
Donna Peberdy is Professor of Gender, Sexuality, Screen and Culture at Southampton Solent University and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. Her public engagement fellowship project, Screening Sexual Violence, examines film representations of violence against women and girls, harnessing short film for education, activism and social change.
Professor Peberdy was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2022-2023).
Gareth Thomas is a Reader in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University (UK). He is a sociologist who is interested in disability, health and illness, care, reproduction, and stigma. Gareth is currently a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Sociology of Health and Illness.
Dr Thomas was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2023).
