Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely.

Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. She lives on a secluded bend of the Broken River in north-east Victoria.

Claire Messud is a recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Carys Davies’s debut novel, West, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, runner-up for the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction.

She is also the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike (published in Australia as the single collection The Travellers and Other Stories), which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She lives in Edinburgh.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the short story collection The Refugees and the novel The Sympathizer. The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association.

His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and several collections of short fiction, the latest of which is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.

She is also the translator of numerous works from the French by, among others, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Leiris, and was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

Weike Wang earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health at Harvard University.

She received her MFA from Boston University. She is a 2017 '5 Under 35' honouree of the National Book Foundation. She lives in New York.

James Wood has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.

He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian from 1992 to 1995, and a book critic at the New Republic from 1995 to 2007. He has published a number of books with Cape, including How Fiction Works, which has been translated into thirteen languages.