Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Nicola Griffith is the multiple-award-winning author of seven novels and a memoir. A native of Yorkshire, England - now a dual U.S./U.K. citizen - she is a onetime self-defense instructor who turned to writing full-time upon being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

She holds a Ph.D. from Anglia Ruskin University and lives with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle.

M. John Harrison (1945 - ) Michael John Harrison is the author of, amongst others, the Viriconium stories, The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, Signs of Life, Light and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Award (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (Light) and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing). He lives in Shropshire.

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he established the highly successful MA in Creative and Critical Writing in 2002. He has also had a central role in the shaping of creative writing teaching at Sussex at undergraduate level over the past fifteen years.

Nicholas has published two novels with Myriad; Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017). Nicholas has written numerous other critical books, including the academic best-selling textbook An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Fifth edition, 2016) (with Andrew Bennett).

Pat Cadigan (1953 -)Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, NY, and grew up in Fitchburg, MA. Attending the University of Massachusetts on a scholarship, she eventually transferred to the University of Kansas where she received her degree.

Since embarking on her career as a fiction writer in 1987, her Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated short stories have appeared in such magazines as Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine as well as numerous anthologies.

Her first collection, Patterns, was honoured the Locus Award in 1990, and she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992 and 1995 for her novels Synners and Fools. Pat Cadigan moved to the UK in 1996 and now lives in London.

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for more than thirty years. She was the fiction editor of Omni magazine and Sci Fiction and has edited almost one hundred anthologies.

Datlow has also won lifetime achievement awards from three prominent genre organizations and current acquires short fiction for Tor.com.