1999 - The Judges
Profiles

James Naughtie (Chair) presents Today on Radio 4.  Until 1994 he was presenter of The World at One, having previously been chief political correspondent of The Guardian and The Scotsman.  He also presents BBC Radio 4’s monthly Bookclub.  He introduces opera on BBC Radio 3 and, since 1991, has been a presenter of the Proms on BBC Television.  For radio he has written several acclaimed documentary series and he writes widely.  In 1981 he was Laurence Stern Fellow on The Washington Post and he is a former Sony Radio Personality of the Year.  He was educated in Aberdeen and New York.

Cherie Booth QC is a barrister, specialising in Public, Employment and European Community Law.  She was born in Bury and grew up in Liverpool.  After studying Law at the London School of Economics, she came top of her year in her Bar examinations and was called to the Bar in 1976.  She became a Queen’s Counsel in 1995.  She married Tony Blair in 1980 and contested the parliamentary seat of Thanet North in 1983 for the Labour Party.  Cherie is a trustee of Refuge, a vice-president of the Kids Club Network and a patron of Breast Cancer and Sargent Cancer Care for Children.  She is a Chancellor of the Liverpool John Moores University and is an Honorary Fellow of JMU, LSE and the Open University.  She is an FRSA and a Fellow of Advanced Legal Studies.

Orlando Figes joins Birkbeck College, London as Professor of History in April 1999.  Previously he was University Lecturer in History (1987-99) and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1984-99).  Born in London, he graduated with a double-starred first in History from Gonville and Caius College Cambridge.  His first book, Peasant Russia, Civil War, was described by one reviewer as ‘one of the most important books ever published on the Russian Revolution’.  His second, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (Cape) won the 1997 NCR Award, the WHSmith Literary Award 1997, the Wolfson History Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Kate Summerscale is the editor of the Review Section of The Independent on Sunday.  She was educated at Oxford and Stanford universities and worked first at The Independent and then at The Daily Telegraph on the Weekend section.  Her first book, The Queen of Whale Cay, a biography of ‘Joe’ Carstairs (Fourth Estate) was highly acclaimed on publication, shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Biography Award and winner of a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998.

Professor Lewis Wolpert is Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology of University College, London.  His research interests are in the mechanisms involved in the development of the embryo.  He was originally trained as a civil engineer in South Africa but changed to research in cell biology at King’s College, London in 1955.  He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980, awarded the CBE in 1990 and made a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature in 1999.  He has presented science on both radio and TV and has been Chairman of the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science since 1993. He is the author of The Triumph of the Embryo (OUP, 1991), A Passion for Science (OUP, 1992) and The Unnatural Nature of Science (Faber, 1992).  He has just published Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (Faber) which is currently the basis of a BBC2 television series.