Stephen Walsh is a Professor of Music at Cardiff University, and the author of several books on music, including Musorgsky and His Circle (Faber, 2013) which was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize in 2014.

The first volume of his major biography of Stravinsky - Stravinsky: A Creative Spring - won the Royal Philharmonic Society prize in 2000. Volume Two - Stravinsky: The Second Exile - was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the ten best books of 2006.

He was deputy music critic of The Observer from 1966 to 1985. He now reviews for theartsdesk.com website and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 3

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary annual of new writing, and executive editor of Literary Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology about income inequality in America, and Tales of Two Cities, an anthology of new writing about inequality in New York City. He is also the author of two collections of poems, Maps and The Park. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he teaches writing at New York University.