With thanks, the judges of the 2026 Travelling Scholarships:

Brian Dillon

Brian Dillon is an Irish writer based in London. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, frieze and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries.

Joy Francis

Joy Francis is executive director of Words of Colour. The former journalist, academic and editor is a longstanding activist for racial equality in publishing, the media and mental health. Joy’s career is diverse – from launching the first Diversity and the Media MA at the University of Westminster with the Media Diversity Institute to being appointed the media liaison lead for the Hillsborough Inquests by civil rights law firm Birnberg Peirce. In 2023, Joy co-founded the Poets of Colour Incubator for the North of England with Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Remembering What’s Forgotten, an ongoing citywide creative intervention initiative centring mental health, racial justice and heritage with Synergi-Leeds. A former judge for the British Book Awards, Joy was elected to the Royal Society of Literature as an Honorary Fellow in 2022. 

Daniel Hahn

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with sixty-something books to his name. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award and the Blue Peter Award, among others. He is a past chair of the SoA and the Translators Association, and on the board of a number of organisations that work with literature, translation and free speech.

Louise Jury

Louise Jury is a communications and public affairs consultant and writer, working across the creative sector after a long career in journalism. She was director of communications and marketing for ScreenSkills, which develops off-screen talent for UK screen, and headed strategic communications for the Creative Industries Federation advocacy body. She was chief arts correspondent of the London Evening Standard and arts and media correspondent of The Independent and Independent on Sunday having previously campaigned on issues including debt in the developing world and Nazi gold. She sits on the board of the Women’s Prize Trust and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in 2001.

Johny Pitts

Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer, and broadcaster known for his work in exploring African-European identities. He is the co-founder of the European Network Against Racism award-winningAfropean.com, and the author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe , Home Is Not a Place (with Roger Robinson), and the photobook, Afropean: A Journal. A National Geographic Explorer, his Afropean podcast is a recent release in collaboration with Reduced Listening and the National Geographic Society. In recognition, he has received the Jhalak Prize, the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, and the European Essay Prize. The recipient of the inaugural Ampersand/ Photoworks Fellowship, his photography has been exhibited at Foam (Amsterdam), the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), and The Photographer’s Gallery (London). He is also the curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring’s After The End of History: British Working Class Photography (1989–2024).