Born in Trinidad, Ingrid Persaud won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017 and the BBC Short Story Award in 2018. She read law at the LSE and was a legal academic before taking degrees in fine art at Goldsmiths College and Central Saint Martins. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Prospect and Pree magazines. Ingrid lives in London and Barbados.

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels - Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border - as well as The Beautiful Indifference, a collection of short stories, which won the Portico Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

The first story in the collection, 'Butchers Perfume', was also shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award - a prize Hall won in 2013 with 'Mrs Fox', which was included in her 2017 collection, Madame Zero.

As a child, Kiare Ladner wanted to live on a farm, run and orphanage and be on stage. As an adult, she found herself working for academics, with prisoners and on nightshifts.

Her short stories have been published in anthologies, broadcast on the radio and shortlisted in competitions, including the BBC National Short Story Award 2018. Nightshift is her first novel.

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.