Hilary Spurling won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884-1919, and the Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award for Secrets of a Woman's Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920-1969.

She is also the author of Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, Paper Spirits and The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell. She has been Arts and Literary Editor of the Spectator, and a regular reviewer for the Observer, the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph.

David Mason was born in 1969. After graduating, he studied at the University of London, receiving an MA in Imperial and Commonwealth Studies.

Since 1996 he has taught at both graduate and undergraduate level on a wide variety of subjects including the history of southern Africa from 1500 until the present day.

As part of on-going research he intends to visit South Africa in the winter of 2001-02. His first book, Verdun, was published by the Windrush Press in 2000.

Jenny Erpenbeck is the author of The Old Child & The Book of Words (2008), Visitation (2010) and The End of Days (2014, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and Go, Went, Gone (2017), all published by Portobello.

Her fiction is published in fourteen languages.

Susan Bernofsky has translated works by Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, Yoko Tawada, Ludwig Harig and Franz Kafka.

She is the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe and is currently at work on a biography of Robert Walser. Her translation of The Old Child and Other Stories was awarded the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.