Amitav Ghosh is a novelist and essayist whose many books include the acclaimed Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, and Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment.

The 2025 recipient of the Pak Kyongni Prize, often referred to as Korea’s Nobel Prize in Literature, Ghosh, is known for his work, both fiction and nonfiction, that blends masterful storytelling with powerful historical research to enrich our understanding of colonialism and climate change, and how they are often interlinked. 

“Ghosh is one of the most important living writers writing in English.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

Memoirist, critic, translator, and frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of ten books, including the international bestsellers The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, an NPR and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. His other honors include the Prix Médicis in France and the Premio Malaparte, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. In 2022 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

Mendelsohn is the translator of our landmark edition of Homer’s The Odyssey, which has been hailed by classicists and poets alike as a “momentous achievement”: “thrilling,” “rich and rhythmical,” “superb,” “mesmerizing,” “searingly faithful—yet absolutely original.”

“This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet."—Edith Hall, The Telegraph (UK)

Mike Caulfield is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. Creator of the SIFT methodology, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops.

He is the coauthor of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online, an indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds.

"To the novice researcher, Verified serves as a sympathetic and accessible guide to those who feel overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of the modern information machine. For researchers, academics, librarians, and students who are already SIFT adherents, the book provides context and examples in spades, which help explain why the approach makes sense."—College and Research Libraries

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and the founder of the Stanford History Education Group, whose state-of-the-art curriculum on digital literacy has been distributed freely to schools all over the world. He is the author of Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) and coauthor of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online.

"Explores the way we teach history to students and the dismal consequences for political and social life in the internet era. . . . Wineburg's work is vital."—Commonweal, on Why Learn History
 

Daryl Fairweather is chief economist at Redfin, where she analyzes US housing markets and consumer behavior, and a member of the academic advisory council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. A former senior economist at Amazon, she is a regular contributor to Forbes, and she has been featured in 60 Minutes, Today, The New York Times, and Bloomberg, among other outlets.

The first Black woman to receive an economics PhD from the famed University of Chicago, she is the author of Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work.

“Fabulous—unlike any economics book I’ve ever read! Hate the Game is an edgy, in-your-face demonstration of the power of economic thinking.”—Steven Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics
 

Emily Hauser is a senior lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of three novels reimagining the women of Greek myth: For the Most Beautiful, For the Winner, and For the Immortal, as well as the nonfiction book How Women Became Poets.
Her newest book is Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It, which weaves together literary and archaeological evidence to illuminate the rich, intriguing lives of the real women behind Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

“A riveting narrative of the female figures of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey . . . A close study of the epic poems, a meditation on the lives of women then and now, an engaging history of scholarship, and an overview of the archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean and beyond. Written with a novelist’s flair, Penelope’s Bones, with its linked chapters, makes for a surprising page-turner.”—Wall Street Journal

Ada Palmer is associate professor of early modern European history and the college at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and the award-winning Terra Ignota series of novels.

In Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, Palmer offers an irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age. Her University of Chicago class on papal conclaves was featured in The New York Times.

“Palmer is a writer who ranges easily across millennia and media, at home in scholarly, imaginative, and breezily conversational modes."—Chronicle of Higher Education
 

Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago, where he serves as Faculty Director for the Forum on Free Inquiry and Expression, as well as the Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, and currently co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project. 

His most recent book is The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression, a collection of texts that provide the foundation for the University of Chicago’s longstanding tradition of free expression, principles that are at the center of current debates within higher education and society more broadly.
 

"This inspiring collection of carefully reasoned and eloquently phrased writings is a must-read for all members of all academic communities and for everyone else who is interested in the timeless and timely topics of academic freedom and free speech. The volume is a treasure trove of pertinent materials, each with enlightening introductory annotations. An unwavering commitment to open inquiry infuses the whole compendium, and The Chicago Canon invites reading, discussion, and debate on every campus that is—or should be—pursuing and implementing its own policies and practices to promote intellectual freedom."—Nadine Strossen, author of Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know®