Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston. She studied English at Cambridge and since then has gained an MA from Manchester University, trained as a librarian and run a prison library in Lancashire. She now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster.

Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, was published in 2009 and won a Betty Trask Award. In 2011 her second, Cold Light, was published by Sceptre and she was chosen by BBC's The Culture Show as one of the twelve Best New British Novelists.

Her most recent novels, The Friday Gospels and Fell, were published to resounding critical acclaim. She has also written a memoir, Notes Made While Falling. She lives in Lancaster with her husband, son and daughter.

Joanna Walsh's work has appeared in Granta, Narrative, The Stinging Fly and Guernica, amongst others. Her first collection, Fractals, was published by 3:AM Press 2013, and her non-fiction work Hotel was published internationally by Bloomsbury in 2015.

This was followed by Vertigo, published by And Other Stories in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her digitally groundbreaking novella Seed, widely praised for its innovation was released in 2017, and her latest collection of stories Words from the World's End is out now.

She was awarded the 2017 Arts Foundation Fellowship in Literature for the manuscript of Break.Up.

Julianne Pachico was born in 1985 in Cambridge and grew up in Cali, Colombia. She is a graduate of both the MA and PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she currently teaches on the Creative Writing MA. She is the only writer to have two stories in the 2015 anthology of the Best British Short Stories, and her short fiction has been published by The New Yorker among other publications. In 2017 Pachico was shortlisted for the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award.

Matthew Sperling is a lecturer in English Literature at UCL.

His fiction and poetry has been published in, among others, New Statesman, 3:AM, The Junket and Best British Short Stories 2015 edited by Nicholas Royle.

Helen Marshall is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of two short story collections and two poetry chapbooks. Her stories and poetry have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Abyss & Apex, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Tor.com.

She obtained a PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and then spent two years completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford investigating literature written during the time of the Black Death.

Helen has worked as a managing editor for ChiZine Publications, and was recently hired as a permanent Lecturer in Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. She grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, and now resides in Cambridge.