The Panel

Manjeet Mann is a multi-award winning children's author. Her debut YA novel RUN, REBEL was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2021 and won the CILIP Carnegie Shadowers Choice Award, The UKLA Award, Diverse Book Award and Sheffield Children's Book Award. It was also a Guardian best book of 2020. Her second novel The Crossing won The 2021 Costa Children's Book Award, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book Prize 2022 and is currently shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2022. Her debut Picture Book 'Smalls Big Dream' was published in March 2022. 

Lemn Sissay is a bestselling and award-winning writer for adults and children. His Landmark poems are visible in London, Manchester, Huddersfield and Addis Ababa. Sissay was awarded an MBE in 2010, the PEN Pinter Prize in 2019 and an OBE in 2021. He is Chancellor of the University of Manchester and the author of the bestselling memoir, My Name is Why. A QuickReads edition will be published in April 2022, and will be a World Book Night title. Lemn is British and Ethiopian and lives in London. 

Katherine Rundell is the million-copy bestselling author of five children’s novels and has won the Costa Children’s Book Award, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize amongst many others. Katherine spent her childhood in Africa and Europe before taking her degree at the University of Oxford and becoming a Fellow of All Souls College. As well as writing, she studies Renaissance literature and occasionally goes climbing on the rooftops late at night. 

Robin Banerjee is Professor of Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. He directs the CRESS (Children's Relationships, Emotions, and Social Skills) research lab, which investigates children's social and emotional development, and involves close working partnerships with practitioners and policymakers in the areas of education and mental health. 

Recent studies have examined the social and emotional dimensions of school ethos, factors involved in peer acceptance, rejection, and bullying, the social and cognitive processes involved in childhood social anxiety, the psychosocial development of children in the public care system, and the connections between consumer culture and well-being in school children. A core applied focus of the CRESS lab is the development and evaluation of strategies to support young people’s social and emotional functioning.