Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Times bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001.

Since then he has written another twelve novels, including the Number One Sunday Times bestseller One of our Thursdays is Missing, and the Last Dragonslayer series, adapted for television by Sky. Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales.

Garth Nix was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia. A full-time writer since 2001, he previously worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve.

Garth's books include the award-winning young adult fantasy novels Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen and Clariel; the dystopian novel Shade's Children; the space opera A Confusion of Princes; and a Regency romance with magic, Newt's Emerald. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch; the six books of the Seventh Tower sequence; the Keys to the Kingdom series; and the Troubletwisters series and Spirit Animals: Blood Ties (co-written with Sean Williams).

More than five million copies of his books have been sold around the world, his books have appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, the Times and The Australian, and his work has been translated into forty-one languages. He lives in a Sydney beach suburb with his wife and two children.

Robert Silverberg has been a professional writer since 1955, widely known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2004 was designated as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

His books and stories have been translated into forty languages. Among his best known titles are Nightwings, Dying Inside, The Book Of Skulls, and the three volumes of the Majipoor Cycle: Lord Valentine's Castle, Majipoor Chronicles and Valentine Pontifex.

His collected short stories, covering nearly sixty years of work, are being published in nine volumes by SF Gateway and Subterranean Press. His most recent book is Tales Of Majipoor (2013), a new collection of stories set on the giant world made famous in Lord Valentine's Castle.

He and his wife Karen and an assorted population of cats, live in the San Francisco Bay Area in a sprawling house surrounded by exotic plants.

Mary Robinette Kowal is the 2008 recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a multiple Hugo winner, and a frequent finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards.

A professional puppeteer and voice actor, she spent five years touring nationally with puppet theatres. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters.

Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel at the age of seven, and has since sold more than a million copies around the world.

Her books include Bitter Greens, a retelling of Rapunzel which won the 2015 American Library Association Award for Best Historical Fiction; The Wild Girl, the story of the forbidden romance behind the Grimm Brothers’ famous fairy tales, which was named the Most Memorable Love Story of 2013; and The Beast’s Garden, a retelling of ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ set in the underground resistance to Hitler in Nazi Germany. Recently voted one of Australia’s Favourite 15 Novelists, Kate Forsyth has been called ‘one of the finest writers of this generation’.

She has a BA in literature, a MA in creative writing and a doctorate in fairy tale studies, and is also an accredited master storyteller with the Australian Guild of Storytellers.

Juliet Marillier was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, a town with strong Scottish roots. She graduated from Otago University with degrees in arts and music, and has had a varied career which included teaching and performing music as well as working in government agencies.

Juliet now lives in a hundred-and-ten-year-old cottage near the river in Perth, Western Australia, where she writes fulltime. She is a member of the druid order OBOD.

Juliet shares her home with a small pack of waifs and strays. Juliet's historical fantasy novels are published internationally and have won a number of awards.

Angela Slatter is the award-winning author of eight short story collections, including A Feast of Sorrows: Stories, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales.

She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and five Aurealis Awards. Her short stories have appeared widely, including in annual British, Australian and North American Best Of anthologies, and her work has been translated into Spanish, Russian, Polish, Romanian, and Japanese.

Vigil was her first solo novel, and the sequel Corpselight is due out in July 2017. Angela lives in Brisbane, Australia.

Kylie Chan started out as an IT consultant and trainer specialising in business intelligence systems. She worked in Australia and then ran her own consulting business for ten years in Hong Kong.

hen she returned to Australia in 2002, Kylie made the career change to writing fiction, and produced the bestselling nine-book Dark Heavens series, a fantasy based on Chinese mythology, published by HarperVoyager worldwide. She is now a fulltime writer based in Queensland's Gold Coast, enjoying the beach and writing a new science fiction series.

Alison Goodman is the author of Singing the Dogstar Blues and the duology Eon and Eona.

EON has been sold into 14 territories, translated into 11 languages and in 2009 won the Aurealis award and was also shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary awards.

The first title in the Lady Helen trilogy is Lady Helen And The Dark Days Club, which was shortlisted for two 2015 Aurealis Awards being Best Fantasy Novel and Best YA Novel. Alison lives in Brighton, Victoria.

Mark Lawrence was born in Champagne-Urbanan, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. He went back to the US after taking a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College to work on a variety of research projects including the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence programme.

Returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He says he never had any ambition to be a writer so was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight.

His first trilogy, The Broken Empire, has been universally acclaimed as a ground-breaking work of fantasy, and both Emperor of Thorns and The Liar’s Key have won the Gemmell Legend award for best fantasy novel. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol.

Ian Irvine is a marine scientist and fantasy writer who has written twenty-six novels.

His three fantasy series, The View from the Mirror, The Well of Echoes and Song of the Tears, are international bestsellers.

He has also written a near-future eco-thriller trilogy about catastrophic climate change, Human Rites, recently republished in an updated edition, plus eleven novels for children in the Runcible Jones, Sorcerer's Tower and Grim and Grimmer series.

Sebastien de Castell had just finished a degree in Archaeology when he started work on his first dig. Four hours later he realised how much he actually hated archaeology and left to pursue a very focused career as a musician, ombudsman, interaction designer, fight choreographer, teacher, project manager, actor and product strategist.

His only defence against the charge of unbridled dilettantism is that he genuinely likes doing these things and that, in one way or another, each of these fields plays a role in his writing.

He sternly resists the accusation of being a Renaissance Man in the hopes that more people will label him that way. Sebastien lives in Vancouver with his lovely wife and two belligerent cats.