Mark McCrum began his career as a travel writer.  He then wrote about Robbie Williams on his sellout 2001 tour of Europe, which became the no. 1 bestseller Somebody Someday. He has ghostwritten other top ten bestsellers, including Bruce Parry’s Tribe and Walking With The Wounded, describing the celebrated 2011 polar expedition of wounded veterans with Prince Harry. Mark then turned to crime, writing humorous whodunnits such as The Festival Murders and Ghosted under his own name, with accolades ranging from ‘Book of the Week’ in the Daily Mail to ‘Book of the Year’ in the Literary Review and Mail on Sunday

www.markmccrum.com

Gwendoline Riley was born in London. She is the author of seven novels. First Love (2017) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and the Dylan Thomas Prize; it won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. My Phantoms (2021) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. The Palm House will be published in April 2026.  She reviews regularly for the TLS. 

Peter Godwin was born and raised in Zimbabwe. After working as a human rights lawyer, and a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and the BBC, he has authored six non-fiction books including Mukiwa, which won the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire, Apple, Waterstones award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which won the Borders Original Voices Award. His book, The Fear, was selected by the New Yorker as a best book of the year. Godwin has taught writing at Wesleyan and Columbia and served as President of PEN American Center. His latest book is Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars.

Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels Walking on the Ceiling, White on White, and The Anthropologists which was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, TIME, and Vanity Fair, #1 book of the year by New York Magazine, and one of Barack Obama's favourite books of the year, among others. Savaş has also written the nonfiction work The Wilderness, and the short story collection Long Distance. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker magazine. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. She lives in Paris.

https://www.aysegulsavas.org

Bradford Morrow is author of eleven books of fiction, including Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch (PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), Trinity Fields, Giovanni’s Gift, Ariel’s Crossing, The Diviner’s Tale, The Forgers, The Uninnocent, Prague Sonata, The Forger’s Daughter, and The Forger’s Requiem. His work has been translated into 14 languages.

Morrow has taught at Bard College, Princeton, Columbia, and Brown Universities, and the Naropa Institute. He has given several hundred readings here and abroad. His awards include the Academy Award in Fiction (the American Academy of Arts and Letters), an O. Henry Prize, Pushcart Prize, and Guggenheim Felllowship. He edits the acclaimed literary journal, Conjunctions. He has edited a number of books, among them The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death and The New Gothic. His work has been widely anthologized—including Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. He lives in New York City.

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. He is the recipient of numerous international prizes, including the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize, the Prix du livre étranger, the Geschwister/Scholl Preis, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and, most recently, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

The author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, Colombe Schneck has received the Madame Figaro and the Society of French Writers prizes, as well as having been shortlisted for the Renaudot, Femina, and Interallié prizes. She is also the recipient of scholarships from the Villa Medicis in Rome and the Institut Français.

Her book The Paris Trilogy was published in the US and UK in May 2024, the semi-autobiographical take on a woman’s life, starting with Seventeen, progressing with Friendship, and then Swimming: A Love Story, which questions issue of sexuality, bodily autonomy, femininity, friendship and loss. Her new novel « Philip and me » a fiction about 40 years of feud between Philip Roth and Francine du Plessix, published by Editions Stock, will be out in France in January 2026. 

Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space; Human Hours; The Game of Boxes, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim fellow, she received an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, teaches in NYU's MFA Program in Creative Writing, and works as an independent editor.