Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of ‘Atlantic’, ‘The Man Who Loved China’, ‘A Crack in the Edge of the World’, ‘Krakatoa’, ‘The Map That Changed the World’, ‘The Surgeon of Crowthorne’ (’The Professor and the Madman’), ‘The Fracture Zone’, ‘Outposts’ and ‘Korea’, among many other titles. In 2006 he was awarded the OBE. He lives in western Massachusetts and New York City.

Danny Wallace is a Sunday Times and Amazon #1-bestselling author, as well as a BAFTA, Arqiva and Sony-winning performer and presenter. His first book, Join Me, was described as a 'word-of-mouth phenomenon' by The Bookseller and 'one of the funniest stories you will ever read' by the Daily Mail. His second book, Yes Man - in which he decided to say 'Yes' to everything - became a hugely successful film with Jim Carrey in the lead role. He has written and presented shows on all the major UK television and radio networks, and GQ magazine has called him- 'One of Britain's great writing talents'. He currently presents the Important Broadcast on Radio X.

Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother, and when she is not travelling she lives with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, The Pax Britannica Trilogy (Heaven's Command, Pax Britannica, and Farewell the Trumpets), and Conundrum.

She is also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and, more recently, the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. A Writer's World, a collection of her travel writing and reportage from over five decades, was published in 2003.

Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels.

He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years. He has been traveling in and around Tibetan communities and the Himalayas for more than thirty years.