(USA, 1955) is a philosopher, commentator, essaysist and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She combines old ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood with cynical realism: "Idealism for grownups," as she calls it. In 2014 she won the Spinoza Lens, a biannual Dutch prize for an "internationally renowned thinker on ethics and society." Neiman, a Jewish-American, became known with Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. In Why Should You Grow Up? (2015), she uses the work of famous philosophers like Kant, Rousseau and De Beauvoir to show that ideals need not be lost to the passing years, and are especially needed, for example, to counteract the kind of evil embraced by IS youth. "It is precisely our society's materialism that drives young people into the clutches of radical ideology." She holds politicians responsible for no longer daring to promote their own Enlightenment-inspired European culture. 

(The Netherlands, 1960) is a literary critic, writer, curator, interviewer, debate leader and "ambassador between France and the Netherlands in the field of literature", as a French ambassador once said. She has been writing about literature for some 30 years, mainly for the NRC daily. She published books on French and European literature, on Hella S. Haasse and Cees Nooteboom. Her In de voetsporen van mijn grootvader (2021) is an autobiographical search for her literary genes. Before that, she published Met Parijse pen. Literaire omzwervingen (in collaboration with photographer Bart Koetsier, 2020), which takes readers to Paris for walks in the footsteps of famous Dutch and French writers. She was joint artistic curator of the Netherlands' Guest of Honour role at the 2024 Leipzig Book Fair with German journalist Bettina Baltschev.

Go to the website of Margot Dijkgraaf
Instagram: @margotdijkgraaf