Chair:  Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre, responsible for creating a unified artistic vision for the whole 21 acre site. An experienced director of over 100 productions, she was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre in 1997 and is Chair of Culture, Ceremonies and Education at the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games;

Mark McMorris: Jamaican poet and professor of English;

Hisham Matar: Libyan author of the internationally successful first novel, In the Country of Men;

Hannah Pool: Eritrean-born Guardian journalist;

Jonty Driver: South African poet, novelist and lecturer, and previously a Caine Prize judge in 2007.

Previous judges have included (listed in alphabetical order):

Biyi Bandele: Nigerian playwright.

Margaret Busby: Ghanaian author, journalist, broadcaster, publisher and editor of “Daughters of Africa – An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent”;

Shirley Chew PhD: Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds;

J M Coetzee: the only author so far to have won the Booker Prize twice;

Jason Cowley (Chair 2000): novelist and Literary Editor of the New Statesman, who was a Booker Prize judge in 1997;

Buchi Emecheta: Nigerian writer;

Aminatta Forna: Sierra Leonean broadcaster, journalist and author of The Devil that Danced on the Water;

Abdulrazak Gurnah (Chair 2003) - from Zanzibar, who teaches literature at the University of Kent and is the author of six novels, of which ‘Paradise’ was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize;

Dan Jacobson (Chair 2001): South African born writer and Professor at University College London;

Maya Jaggi: critic and arts journalist who contributes regularly to The Guardian and has considerable experience of profiling African writers;

Delia Jarrett-Macauley, award winning novelist;

Jamal Mahjoub: author of seven novels. He was previously shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2004 with The Obituary Tango, from Wasafiri;

Robert Molteno, former Zed Books Managing Editor;

Dr Mpalive Msiska: Lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, whose research interests include the problem of identity in post-colonial African theory and literature;

Alvaro Ribeiro (Chair 2004): Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC;

Bernice Rubens: author whose novels include ‘The Elected Member’ for which she won the 1970 Booker Prize;

Ahdaf Soueif (Chair 2002): Egyptian author of ‘In the Eye of the Sun’ and ‘The Map of Love’, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize;

John Sutherland PhD: Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, and visiting professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology;

Veronique Tadjo: poet, novelist, painter and author of children's books, from the Cote d'Ivoire;

Dr Wangui wa Goro, Kenyan academic, critic and writer;

Baroness (Lola) Young (Chair 2005), is a member of the House of Lords, and former academic whose publications include Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (Routledge). She is board member of the South Bank Centre and Chair of the arts advisory committee of the British Council.