Dame Margaret Drabble was born in 1939. She is the author of seventeen highly acclaimed novels, including most recently The Pure Gold Baby.

She has also written biographies and screenplays, and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980 and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list.

Philip Hensher is a columnist for the Independent, arts critic for the Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British novelist. He has written six novels, including The Mulberry Empire and the Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, and one collection of short stories. He lives in South London.

Tim Etchells is an artist and writer based in Sheffield and London. His work shifts between performance, visual art, and writing, and is presented in a wide variety of contexts, from museums and galleries to festivals and public sites. Since 1984, he has been the leader of the ground-breaking, world-renowned Sheffield performance group Forced Entertainment, winners of the 2016 International Ibsen Award.

His work in visual art has been shown in institutions including Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, and Witte de With (Rotterdam), whilst his performances - either solo, with Forced Entertainment, or in collaboration with other artists, choreographers, and musicians - have been presented in venues including the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou Paris, Volksbuhne Berlin, Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna) and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, to name a few.

His public site commissions have included projects for Times Square (New York), Derry-Londonderry UK City of Culture 2013 and Glastonbury festival. Etchells has developed a unique voice in writing fiction and is currently Professor of Performance and Writing at Lancaster University.

Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer and broadcast journalist. He has received various awards for his work exploring African-European identity, including a Decibel Penguin Prize and an ENAR (European Network Against Racism) award. He is the curator of the online journal Afropean.com, part of the Guardian's Africa Network and has collaborated with Caryl Philips on a photographic essay about London's immigrant communities for the BBC and Arts Council.

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. Her first collection, Division Street (2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.

In 2014, she was named as a 'Next Generation Poet', the prestigious accolade announced only once every ten years, recognising the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland. No Map Could Show Them (2016), her second collection, about women and mountaineering, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Helen has been the Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence and the Derbyshire Poet Laureate and was named one of the RSL's 40 under 40 Fellows in 2018. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. Black Car Burning was her first novel, and A Line Above the Sky is her first work of narrative memoir.