Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and a story collection. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award, and has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham.

Eley Williams lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories won the James Tait Black Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Nell Stevens has a First in English and Creative Writing from Warwick, after which she went on to study Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard, to receive a Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award for her MFA in Fiction at Boston University, and to complete a Ph.D. in Victorian literature at King’s College London.

She was a finalist in the 2011 Elle magazine Writing Talent Contest, and a runner-up in both the 2014 Mslexia Memoir Competition and the 2015 Mslexia Short Story Prize.

Zoe Gilbert is the winner of the Costa Short Story Award 2014. Her work has appeared in anthologies from Comma, Cinnamon, Labello, and Pankhearst presses, and has been published in journals including The Stinging Fly, Mechanics' Institute Review, Bohemyth, Holdfast, Lighthouse, and the British Fantasy Society Journal.

In 2015 she appeared at the Beijing Bookworm Festival in China on behalf of the British Council and was commissioned by Microsoft to create a short story book. She is working on a PhD in Fiction and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, focusing on the influence of folk tales on contemporary short stories.

She chairs the Short Story Critique Group at Waterstones Piccadilly and co-hosts the Short Story Club at the Word Factory. She is also the co-founder of London Lit Lab, providing creative writing courses for Londoners.

Jo Lloyd won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2019 and an O. Henry Prize in 2018. Her stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and elsewhere. The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies is her first collection. She grew up in South Wales, where she now lives.

Adrian Duncan is an Irish writer and artist based in Ireland and Berlin. He trained and worked as a structural engineer for over a decade, received his charter-ship from the Institute of Engineers Ireland in 2008 and later returned to university to study fine art. He has written a collection of short stories titled Chicken-Lane Manifesto.

Tim MacGabhann was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, and began his writing career as a music journalist while studying English Literature and French at Trinity College, Dublin.

Since 2013, he has reported from all over Latin America for outlets including Esquire, Thomson Reuters, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post.

His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry has appeared in Gorse, The Stinging Fly, and Washington Square, and he holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He lives in Mexico City.

Leila Aboulela was born in Cairo and grew up in Khartoum. She is the author of four novels: The Translator, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, all of which were longlisted for the Orange Prize, and The Kindness of Enemies.

Lyrics Alley won Novel of the Year at the Scottish Book Awards and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, while Aboulela's collection of short fiction, Coloured Lights, won the Caine Prize. She lives in Aberdeen.

David Rose is Home Affairs Correspondent of the Observer.

His books include Beneath the Mountains and A Climate of Fear.