An acclaimed author and journalist, Xinran began her career as a radio host in China, rising to success reporting on the lives of women across the country. She left China to publish her first book, ‘The Good Women of China’, an impactful account of the experiences of many women throughout the development of modern China; it quickly became an international bestseller. 

She has gone on to publish 11 books on China,  the acclaimed Sky Burial; the novel Miss Chopsticks; the groundbreaking book of oral history China Witness; The Promise, a study of love in China over four generations; and most recently, The Book of Secrets. She is also a regular contributor to The Guardian and the BBC. In 2004, Xinran founded the Mother's Bridge of Love, a charity which seeks to support adopted Chinese children living outside China.

Liam Cochrane is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Bangkok. He began his career in journalism in Cambodia in 2004, working as a reporter and later managing editor of the Phnom Penh Post, before moving into radio and print work across the region. He was previously posted to Port Moresby, considered the ABC's toughest correspondent posting, and was the only foreign reporter on Manus Island during the 2014 attack on Australia's asylum seeker detention centre. He also hosted Radio Australia's Connect Asia for several years.

His book, The Cave: The Inside Story of the Amazing Thai Cave Rescue, drew on the two weeks he spent covering the Tham Luang cave rescue, much of it stationed at the entrance in daily contact with the divers.

Rachna Khaira is an Indian investigative journalist, formerly a senior staff correspondent for The Tribune covering regional politics, NRI affairs, and sport from Jalandhar. She began her career with Asian News International before working with the Times of India and the Indian Express.

She is best known for her 2018 investigation exposing vulnerabilities in India's Aadhaar biometric database, which found that personal data for over a billion citizens could be purchased for a small fee. The story prompted an FIR filed against her by the UIDAI and won her the RedInk Journalist of the Year award. She now writes for HuffPost.

André Dao is a writer, editor and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, and the NSW Premier's Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and received the Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, and Liminal. 

He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the experiences of people detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum, and a producer of the Walkley Award-winning podcast The Messenger. His writing has also appeared in Griffith Review, The Monthly, and the Sydney Review of Books.

Bharat Joshi is the CEO of JCurve Ventures Pvt. Ltd. Prior to founding JCurve, he worked and trained with leading multinational and Indian companies across Malaysia, Denmark, and India. He writes regularly for print and online publications including the Wall Street Journal, CNN-IBN, and the Economic Times, and is visiting faculty at Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi.

He is based in New Delhi, India.

Aarti Betigeri is a multi-platform journalist and former foreign correspondent based in Canberra. She spent almost a decade in India reporting across South Asia for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, the Christian Science Monitor, and Public Radio International, among others, and has interviewed three world leaders. She worked on major investigative projects including an ABC Foreign Correspondent documentary on international surrogacy. 

Prior to her move to India, she worked as a television news journalist and presenter with the ABC and SBS. She currently writes for Monocle and contributes to a range of other local and international outlets.