Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.
Alice Sebold is the author of the bestselling novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, and the memoir Lucky. She lives in California with her husband, the writer Glen David Gold.
Anna Richards was born in Essex and currently lives in London. Little Gods, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, is her first novel
Belinda McKeon, an award-winning playwright and journalist, and worked as an arts writer for the Irish Times. McKeon has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.