Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and, most recently, Elon Musk. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023.

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), and a widely acclaimed history of his country, India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007) He is also the author of a two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi Before India, 2013, and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 2018, both published by Knopf), and of a memoir of his life as a cricket fan, The Commonwealth of Cricket (William Collins, 2020).  His most recent book is Rebels against the Raj (Knopf, 2022). His books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Howard Milton Prize of the British Society for Sports History, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate in the humanities from Yale University. 

Annette Gordon-Reed, the renowned historian and author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), gives this year’s talk on writing and researching biography. Her many other books include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy; Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History; and On Juneteenth. Gordon-Reed, who is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, has received numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.​