Tommy Orange was born and raised in Oakland, California. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

Tommy currently teaches at the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Naomi A. Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was published in 2006 in ten languages and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstone's 25 Writers for the Future.

Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in April 2010. Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian. Naomi A. Alderman's 2017 novel, The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys women’s prize for fiction.

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching (which won the Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Fox and the short story collection What is Not Yours is Not Yours.

In 2013, Helen was included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

Yiyun Li is the author of two novels, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and two short-story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as the memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won literary awards including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was listed among Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists 2007. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Charlie Kaufman is the screenwriter of many films including Anomalisa, Synechdoche, New York, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Being John Malkovich.

He won an Academy Award for his work on Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind and has been nominated three additional times; he is a three-time BAFTA winner for screenwriting; and he has been nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, among many other film honours

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.

The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Leone Ross was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and her second novel, Orange Laughter,was chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Women's Hour Watershed Fiction favourite. Her short fiction has been widely anthologised and her first short-story collection, the 2017 Come Let Us Sing Anyway was nominated for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and the OCM BOCAS Prize. Ross has taught creative writing for twenty years, at University College Dublin, Cardiff University and Roehampton University in London. She is editor of the first black British anthology of speculative fiction, due out in 2022 with Peepal Tree Press. Prior to writing fiction, Ross worked as a journalist. Leone Ross lives in London but intends to retire near water.