Adam Ogilvie is a Leeds City Councillor for Beeston & Holbeck and an executive board member for Leisure, Culture & Skills. […]
Speakers and Panellists
previous speakers

Andy Abbott
Andy Abbott is an artist, write and musician. He’s a founding member of the Black Dogs arts collective, who is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD into socially engaged art and self-organised culture with the University of Leeds. […]

Michael Schmidt
Michael Schmidt is a poet, author and scholar and academic born in Mexico City and educated in the United States, and studied at Harvard, Wadham College and Oxford. He is founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press and a founder (1973) and general editor of PN Review. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an OBE in 2006 for services to poetry. […]

George Szirtes
George Szirtes is a Budapest-born poet who came to England as a refugee in 1956. His first book, The Slant Door was joint winner of the 1980 Faber Prize. He has published several books since that have brought him the Cholmondeley Award and the T S Eliot Prize for Reel (2004). His New and Collected Poems was published in 2008 and his most recent collection, The Burning of the Books and Other […]

Michele Ledda
Michele Ledda is a teacher and writer. He has an MA by research in English from Leeds University, with a dissertation on James Joyce’s Ulysses and Petronius’ Satyricon. A critic of child-centred education, he has written articles for several publications, including the Guardian, Spiked and Culture Wars, and is the author of the chapter on English teaching in The Corruption of the Curriculum (Civitas, 2007). Michele is also co-founder of The Leeds […]

Karl Sharro
Karl Sharro is an architect, satirist and commentator on the Middle East. He is known online as Karl reMarks, the director of the fictional Institute of Internet Diagrams. Karl has written for a number of international publications and organisations, such as the Independent, The Sunday Times, Foreign Policy, Politico, The Atlantic, The Globe and Mail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Creative Time Reports, Vice, Index on Censorship, and Die Presse. […]

Rachel Unsworth
Rachel Unsworth is a lecturer in Geography at the University of Leeds researching urban sustainability, property development, regeneration, planning. She is also a Director of Leeds Love It Share It, an open source forum for ideas, debate and action in Leeds set-up Bauman Lyons Architects, the University of Leeds and Leeds Beckett University. […]

Martin Dean
Martin Dean is Head of Leeds Initiative & International Partnership at Leeds City Council. […]

Irena Bauman
Irena Bauman is an architect and co-founder and director of Bauman Lyons Architects. She is also is a Professor of Sustainable Urbanism at Sheffield University, a Patron of Urban Design Group, and a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts. Irena was also the Commissioner for the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment for the UK from 2002 to 2009. […]