Yann Martel was born in Spain but currently lives in Montreal. He is the highly acclaimed author of Self, a novel, and of the story collection The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Life of Pi is his third book and was shortlisted for both the Governor General Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Ben Marcus was born in 1967, educated at Brown and NYU, and now teaches and runs a writers’ website at Brown University in Providence.
Robert Macfarlane won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his first book, Mountains of the Mind (2003). His second, The Wild Places (2007), was similarly celebrated, winning three prizes and being shortlisted for six more. Both books were adapted for television by the BBC. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Marisa Acocella Marchetto is based in New York. She was hired to create first cartoon strip for The Times.At the young age of forty-two Marisa was diagnosed with breast cancer, inspiring her to write her graphic memoir Cancer Vixen.She is now healthy, happily married and writing her third graphic novel.
Louis Menand is a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and has been a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books since 1994.
Cornelius Medvei was born in 1977 and grew up in Suffolk and London. He studied French and German at Oriel College, Oxford. He then went to China and worked as a teacher, first in Changzhou and then in Nanjing. Cornelius took an MA in Chinese at Sheffield University, 2001-2002. Cornelius currently lives and works in London.
Imbolo Mbue is a native of Limbe, Cameroon. She holds a BS from Rutgers University and an MA from Columbia University. A resident of the United States for more than a decade, she lives in New York City. This is her first novel.
David Morgan is an editor and journalist who has written for the ‘Los Angeles Times’, ‘New York Newsday’, ‘The Hollywood Reporter’, ‘Sight and Sound’ and ‘Empire’, amongst many others. He worked with Terry Gilliam on the interactive laserdiscs of Brazil and ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’.
