Described by Le Monde as ‘As fine an actor as she is a singer’ (Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady, Theatre du Chatelet), Sarah Gabriel is a singer, writer, and actor with a passion for creating work with artists of all disciplines.

Arthur Jeffes founded Penguin Cafe in 2009, bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians initially to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world renowned PCO music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997.

Helen Gordon's books include Notes from Deep Time (Profile), Landfall (Penguin) and, with Travis Elborough, Being a Writer (Frances Lincoln). She has written about nature, science, clothes and books for various newspapers and magazines including the Economist's 1843 magazine, the Guardian and Wired UK, and is a former Granta magazine editor.

Born and raised in UK, Gurdain Rayatt is one of the leading tabla players and teachers in UK and Europe performing internationally with renowned Indian Classical musicians as well as world/crossover and fusion projects spanning several genres.

Dr Sam Guglani is a Consultant Oncologist in Cheltenham, specialising in the management of lung and brain tumours. He has Masters degrees in Ethics and Creative Writing. He is director of Medicine Unboxed, which illuminates the challenges and wonders of medicine through the arts. Sam’s debut novel, Histories, was published in 2017.

"In spring things come together, blood flows into the heart and away from the heart, swallow appear and swallows vanish."

Tim Dee was born in Liverpool in 1961. He has worked as a BBC radio producer for twenty years and divides his life between Bristol and Cambridge. He is the author of THE RUNNING SKY (2009) and FOUR FIELDS (2013). He is also the editor of GROUND WORK, an anthology of nature writing, which Jonathan Cape published in March 2018. LANDFILL, Tim's book on gulls, literature and landfill sites, was published by Little Toller Books in October 2018. GREENERY: JOURNEYS IN THE SPRINGTIME was published by Jonathan Cape in March 2020.

"In the owl-light, / when loneliness shines / through your bones like a bare bulb."

Liz Berry is an award-winning poet from the Black Country and the author of The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, Black Country and The Republic of Motherhood.

Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading, of 'Hill Speak' at the 2011 National Poetry Competition awards, he has spoken at various literature festivals and in programmes for BBC radio, and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem 'The Word'.

"Dear friends, would you look, only look. For love, allied to attention, will be urgently needed in the years to come."

Katherine Rundell is the author of Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, The Good Thieves, and The Zebra’s Great Escape. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Arthur Jeffes founded Penguin Cafe in 2009, bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians initially to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world renowned PCO music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997.

Arthur, a talented composer in his own right, quickly began to create new and unique genre-defying music, with the spellbinding philosophy of the Penguin Cafe always in his mind.

"In an aimless universe the emergence of compassion is an evolutionary miracle, a shock as remarkable as the sudden jump into life."

Richard Holloway is a Scottish writer and broadcaster, and was formerly bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal church.

"What makes the difference between being conscious at all and being a chunk of living meat, or lifeless silicon, without any inner universe?"

Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years.