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Marek Beylin is a Polish journalist and writer, who works for Gazeta Wyborcza. He studied art history at the University of Warsaw and in the 70s and 80s he was active in the democratic opposition. During this period he worked as an editor of the Krytyka quarterly and together with the underground weekly, Tygodnik Mazowsze. Upon the imposition of martial…

Kirsty Lang is a presenter of Radio 4’s flagship arts programme Front Row. She spent many years as a foreign correspondent, reporting for the BBC and The Sunday Times from Eastern Europe and, later, Paris. Kirsty has been a presenter on Channel 4 News, BBC 4 and BBC World. In 2012, she was a visiting professor at Columbia University’s School…

Alisa Ganieva is a journalist and author, who comes from Dagestan in the south of Russia and is now based in Moscow. She writes about the clash of traditional and modern societies, Islamic insurgencies and the ideological and domestic confusion of the region she grew up in. She published her controversial first novel, Salam Dalgat!, under a male pseudonym, winning…

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary film-maker. Her collections include Purdah (Oxford University Press), Postcards from God, I speak for the Devil and The Terrorist at My Table (all published by Penguin India and Bloodaxe Books UK), Leaving Fingerprints and Over the Moon (Bloodaxe Books UK). Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English syllabuses…

Frank Vandenbroucke is a Flemish academic and former politician of the Socialistische Partij Anders [SP.a]. He studied at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven [KUL], where he gained both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in economics, before completing an MPhil in economics at Cambridge University in 1982. It was also in England that he later received his D.Phil (from Oxford University’s Faculty…

Anton Hemerijck is a professor of Institutional Policy Analysis at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universität. From September 2009 til March 2014, he was the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and vice rector of the university and, between 2001 and 2009, he was the director of the Netherlands Council for Government Policy (WRR). During that same period, he also held a…

Agnieszka Holland is a Polish-French film director and screenwriter, renowned for her political contributions to Polish New Wave cinema. Despite starting her career working in Poland as an assistant to Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrej Wajda, she left the country shortly before the introduction of martial law in 1981, moving to France, where she has remained till the present day. Holland…

Miklos Haraszti is a writer, journalist, human rights advocate and university professor. His books, including A Worker in a Worker’s State (1975) (a book for which he was sentenced to a suspended prison term on charges of “subversive agitation”) and The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism (1983) (revealing the censorship and self-censorship mechanisms at play in Communist Hungary), have been…

Claire Fox is the founder and director of the Institute of Ideas [IoI] in London, which she established in order to create a public space where ideas could be contested without the constraints imposed by traditional debating environments. She convenes the Battle of Ideas festival, which has been taking place annually in London since 2005, and she initiated The Institute of Ideas‘…

The deBuren debate What are the merits of economic contraction, is degrowth the way forward? The pros and cons of economic growth. has now finished, however, you can watch the full discussion here in Dutch and English-language highlights will be produced and made available on the debate’s event page in the near future.  This debate sought to assess the alternatives to growth,…

The last Festival of Ideas on Europe session in 2019 assesses the state & future of Europe's media. Focusing on the relationship between media ownership, social media, information access and democracy, the founder of EURACTIV, Christophe Leclercq, looks at how media outlets can come to grips with the new circumstances and why information policy should be a priority for the EU in 2019-2024.
Watch the live stream & find out about the rest of the festival!

Piet Depuydt works as a finance & economics editor for De Tijd, a Belgian newspaper which mainly focuses on business and economics. Before working for De Tijd, he was the editor-in-chief of the financial magazine Trends, founder of the magazine Bizz and an editor at the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Information valid as of spring 2016.