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Born in 1972 in the Metn region of Lebanon, Nathalie and her family moved to England in 1983 when Israel invaded Lebanon. She won the Radio 4 Dotdotdot short story competition in 2001. She is the author of ‘The Double in the Fiction of R.L. Stevenson, Wilkie Collins and Daphne du Maurier’ (2003) and has co-edited various books for Usborne.

Cecelia Ahern was born and grew up in Dublin. Her novels have been translated into thirty-five languages and have sold more than twenty-five million copies in over fifty countries. Two of her books have been adapted as films and she has created several TV series.

She and her books have won numerous awards, including the Irish Book Award for Popular Fiction for The Year I Met You.

She lives in Dublin with her family.

After a short stint in catering, leading entrepreneur Tony Allan sensed a gap in the market, and established his own fish suppliers: Cutty now supplies fish to most of the capital’s top restaurants. He now heads Bank and fish! chains of restaurants. Michelin-starred Giorgio Locatelli is one of Britain’s best known Italian chefs. He began his career at his family’s restaurant in Italy.

David Aaronovitch is a writer, broadcaster and commentator on international politics and the media. He writes for The Times Comment page and has previously written for The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent, winning numerous accolades, including Columnist of the Year 2003 and the 2001 Orwell prize for journalism. He is also the author of Paddling to Jerusalem and Arson, Rape and Bloody Murder.

Alaa al Aswany was born in 1957. He is a dentist by profession, and for many years practised in the Yacoubian Building, which was to form the setting for his bestselling novel of the same name. He has written prolifically for Egyptian newspapers on politics, literature and social issues and his second novel, ‘Chicago’, was published by Fourth Estate in 2008.

Yomi Adegoke is a multi award-winning journalist and author. She is a columnist at the Guardian and British Vogue and the former host of the Women’s Fiction Prize podcast. In 2018, she co-wrote the Sunday Times bestselling book Slay In Your Lane and was named one of the most influential people in London by the Evening Standard. She has been awarded the Groucho Maverick and Marie Claire Future Shaper awards and named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. The List is her debut novel.

Molly Antopol is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, where she currently teaches as a Jones Lecturer. Her short stories have appeared in numerous American publications, and she has received special mention in ‘Best American Short Stories’. Her essays and reviews appear in the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’, ‘The Rumpus’ and NPR’s ‘This American Life’. She lives in San Francisco and Tel Aviv.