Stella Duffy has written thirteen novels, over fifty short stories, and ten plays. She has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year and twice won the CWA Short Story Dagger.

HBO have optioned her two Theodora novels for television. In addition to her writing work, Stella is a theatre-maker and the co-director of the national Fun Palaces campaign for greater access to culture for all.

She was awarded an OBE in 2016 for her services to the Arts. 

Frank Cottrell-Boyce is a successful British screenwriter whose film credits include Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie and 24 Hour Party People. Millions, his debut chidlren's novel, won the 2004 Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award.

His second novel, Framed, was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Children's Fiction Award and has also been shortlisted for the 2005 Carnegie Medal. His third novel, Cosmic, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Roald Dahl Funny Prize.

Frank has also written a sensational sequel to the much-loved Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the heartwarming Runaway Robot.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize.

Her short story 'The Not-Dead and the Saved' won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize.

Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize.

Maggie Gee has written 15 books to great acclaim including The White Family and Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, and her work has been translated into 14 languages.

In 2012 there was an international conference about her work at St Andrew’s University. One of Granta’s original ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been shortlisted for global prizes including the Orange (now Women’s) Prize, and the Dublin International IMPAC Prize.

She writes novels, short stories, memoir, poetry and journalism, is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, a Director of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. Maggie Gee was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2012. She lives in London WC1, and Ramsgate, Kent.

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels - Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border - as well as The Beautiful Indifference, a collection of short stories, which won the Portico Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

The first story in the collection, 'Butchers Perfume', was also shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award - a prize Hall won in 2013 with 'Mrs Fox', which was included in her 2017 collection, Madame Zero.

Tania Hershman is a poet and writer based in Manchester.

A former science journalist, she is the author of three short story collections and two books of poetry and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers and Artists Companion

Alison MacLeod is the author of three novels The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013 and two story collections. She is the joint winner of the Eccles British Library Writer's Award 2016 and was a finalist for the 2017 Governor General's Award. She was Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester until 2018, when she became Visiting Professor to write full-time. She lives in Brighton.