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Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the National Book Award, among others. The title story from Witness was chosen by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as a 2021 O. Henry Prize winner and the story ‘Comfort’ was longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. He was raised in the Bronx and Brooklyn and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Jane Borodale studied site-specific sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art. She was recently Leverhulme writer-in-residence at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex. Her first novel The Book of Fires was shortlisted for the Orange New Writers Prize, and she lives in the West Country with her husband and two children.

Michael Bracewell is the author of five works of fiction: ‘The Crypto-Amnesia Club’ (Serpent’s Tail, 1988); ‘Missing Margate’ (1988); ‘Divine Concepts of Physical Beauty’ (Secker, 1989); ‘The Conclave’ (Secker, 1992) and ‘Saint Rachel’ (Cape, 1995). He is also a journalist who regularly contributes to the ‘Observer’, ‘Guardian’, ‘Independent’, ‘The Face’, ‘Harpers & Queen’, ‘frieze’ and other magazines. He occasionally presents TV programmes.

Elisa Beynon is a vicar’s wife with two young children. She lives in North London.

David Browne is the staff music critic at Entertainment Weekly, during which time he has hung with Beck, gone shopping with Leonard Cohen and roadied for Kiss. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Musician and other publications. He is also the writer of Amped.

Simon de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. A close friend of the writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Satre, and well-known as a leader of the Existentialist movement in Paris, her novels have won wide acclaim throughout the world. Her famous work, The Second Sex, was hailed as a landmark study of women, and her novels, including The Woman Destroyed and She Came to Stay, have become well-loved classics. She died in 1968.

Judy Budnitz was born in 1973 and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. She graduated from Harvard in 1995 and received an MFA in creative writing from New York University in 1998. She is the author of a collection of stories, ‘Flying Leap’.‘If I Told You Once’, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Thomas Brussig is the author of nine novels, including Wasserfarben and Helden wie wir. He also wrote the screenplays for two film adaptations of his novels Helden wie wir and Sonnenallee. Born in East Berlin, Brussig now divides his time between Berlin and Mecklenburg.