James Cañón received his MFA from Columbia University in May 2004. Recipient of the 2001 Henfield Prize for fiction and finalist in the 2002 International Rolex Award, James has been awarded fellowships from Columbia, MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Millay and the Blue Mountain Center.
Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of nine novels, including Inès of My Soul,Daughter of Fortune, and Portrait in Sepia. She has also written a collection of stories, four memoirs, and a trilogy of children’s novels. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages and have become bestsellers across four continents. In 2004 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Isabel Allende lives in California.
Dava Sobel is the internationally renowned author of ‘Longitude’ and ‘Galileo’s Daughter’. She is also an award-winning former science reporter for the ‘New York Times’ and writes frequently about science for several magazines, including the ‘New Yorker’, ‘Audubon’, ‘Discover’, ‘Life’ and ‘Omni’. She is currently writing a book called ‘The Planets’ for Fourth Estate. She lives in East Hampton, New York.
Marti Leimbach was born in 1963 in Washington, DC. She has written several other novels, one of which, Dying Young, was turned into a major feature film in 1991 staring Julia Roberts. Marti now lives in the UK.
Craig Brown has been writing the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye since 1989. He has written for a widevariety of publications, including the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Spectator. His books include One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and Ma’am Darling, which won the James Tait Black award.
Evan Mandery is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He is the author of two works of non-fiction and two previous novels, ‘Dreaming of Gwen Stefani’ and ‘First Contact’.
Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.
Carl Barat is an English musician and actor. He was the frontman and lead singer of Dirty Pretty Things and was co-frontman of The Libertines.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than 55 languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Financial Times. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Winner of Winners” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; the essays We Should All Be Feminists, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, and Notes on Grief; and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a book for children. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Jim Riordan has been a double bassist, hotel porter, railway clerk, barman, postman, unbreakable tea-set salesman, award-winning children’s author, spy and footballer, and is now Professor Emeritus in Russian Studies at the University of Surrey. He lives in Portsmouth with his family.
Mary Karr was born in 1955 in Texas. She is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. She is the author of three memoirs, The Liar’s Club,Cherry and Lit. She lives in New York where she teaches English at Syracuse University.
Ami McKay started her writing career as a freelance writer for CBC Radio. Her work has aired on numerous public radio programs throughout Canada, the United States and around the world. Her documentary, ‘Daughter of Family G’ won an Excellence in Journalism Medallion at the 2003 Atlantic Journalism Awards. She lives with her husband and two sons in an old birth house on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.
Tilly Bagshawe is the internationally bestselling author of nine previous novels. A single mother at seventeen, Tilly won a place at Cambridge University and took her baby daughter with her.
She went on to enjoy a successful career in the City before becoming a writer. As a journalist, Tilly contributed regularly to the Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Evening Standard before following in the footsteps of her sister Louise and turning her hand to novels.
