Born in Calcutta, India, in 1962, Amit Chaudhuri was brought up in Bombay. He graduated from University College, London, and was a research student at Balliol College, Oxford. He was later Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and received the Harper Wood Studentship for English Literature and Poetry from St John’s College, Cambridge. He has contributed fiction, poetry and reviews to numerous publications including The Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and Granta magazine. His first book, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), a novella and a number of short stories, won the Betty Trask Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best First Book) and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize.

Buchi Emecheta OBE (born July 21, 1944, Lagos, Nigeria—died January 25, 2017, London, England) was an Igbo writer who wrote novels, plays, autobiography, and children’s book. She is known for her first novel, Second Class Citizen. Others include The Bride Price, The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood. Her novels deal largely with the difficult and unequal role of women in both immigrant and African societies and explore the tension between tradition and modernity.

Poet, novelist and playwright, Fred D’Aguiar was born in London to Guyanese parents. He grew up in Guyana, returning to England in his teens. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading English with African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is the author of five novels, including, Children of Paradise, about Jonestown, Guyana. His first novel, The Longest Memory (Pantheon, 1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His eight poetry book and most recent, Letters to America is a UK, Poetry Book Society Choice. His numerous plays have been staged in the UK and broadcast on BBC radio.

Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 to Catholic parents in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she now lives with her family. She studied with Seamus Heaney at Queen’s University, earning a BA and MA, and later returned as their first female writer-in-residence. She is the author of over 20 poetry collections including most recently Love, The Magician (2018), Blaris Moor (2015), The High Caul Cap (2012), and The Currach Requires No Harbours (2010).