Deborah Posel, a sociology professor and leading South African scholar with a formidable international reputation, was the founding director of the Wits Institute for Social Economic Research (WISER) at Wits University, which she founded in 2000 and headed until the end of 2008. Now at the University of Cape Town, she has raised funds for, and will lead, the Institute for the Humanities in Africa. It has three main objectives linking the Faculties of Law and Humanities: to do and champion interdisciplinary research, to help produce SA’s next generation of scholars and to run initiatives that will bridge the divide between UCT and wider publics in Cape Town.

Deon Meyer, a former journalist, advertising man and brand consultant, is a full-time author of crime thrillers. He has published eight novels and two short story collections in his native Afrikaans. His books have been translated into 21 languages, and won several local and international awards, including the ATKV Prose Prize, die M-Net Most Filmic Novel Ward, the French Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and two German Krimi Awards. He loves BMW GS motorcycles, Mozart and rock & roll, and lives with his family in Durbanville, and Loxton in the Karoo.

Donald Paul, a freelance journalist and editor, likes reading, writing and eating, not necessarily in that order. He was owner/publisher of The San Francisco Review of Books when he lived in California. Since returning to South Africa he has edited a number of magazines including the monthly magazine SACityLife – which became a successful television show on M-Net as Big City, and later with e-tv as CityLife – The Property Magazine and The Big Issue, which he left in 2009. He worked with Media24 to launch Drum into East Africa and was the editorial and design consultant on PS—Play Safe, a Medical Research Council magazine aimed at urban black African men. He is a member of the Slow Food organisation.

Duncan Brown is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape, and also a Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has published widely in the field of South African literary and cultural studies, and his books include Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance (1998), Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa (1999), To Speak of this Land: Identity and Belonging in South Africa and Beyond (2006) and Religion and Spirituality in South Africa: New Perspectives (2009).

Graeme Bloch is an education policy analyst, having graduated from the University of Cape Town where he specialised in economic history. He taught in the Education faculty at the University of Western Cape, and was project manager for youth development at the Joint Education Trust.  He has worked as head of Social Development in the Department of Welfare, as Director of Social Development in the Joburg Metro, and is now with the Development Bank of South Africa. Before 1994, he was detained and arrested numerous times for his involvement in the democratic movement and banned from 1976-81. He is a member of UCT Council, serves as director on Lafarge Education Trust and is a judge for the Impumelelo Innovation Awards. Graeme has written and published widely, in particular on education. His most recent book is The Toxic Mix: What is wrong with SA schools and how to fix it.