Aamer Hussein was born in 1955 in Karachi, Pakistan. He has lived in London since the 70s. He is the author of five collections of stories, most recently Turquoise (2002), This Other Salt (2005) and Insomnia (2007). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and lectures at the University of Southampton. He is also Director of the MA in National and International Literatures in English at the Institute of English Studies (University of London). He has reviewed for the Independent, the TLS, Literary Review and the New Statesman and was on the jury of the Commonwealth Prize (Eurasia) 2006/7.

Eibhlín Evans grew up in Dublin. She moved to England where she gained a PhD in English and Philosophy and taught in universities for many years. Since her return to Dublin in 2004, she has been a member of the School of English and Drama at University College Dublin where she has been involved in the recently established M.A. Degree in Creative Writing. She has published academic articles, essays and reviews and has edited a collection of essays on Irish writing. Her research has been chiefly centered on twentieth century and contemporary writing, including Irish writing and women’s writing. She is actively involved in the literary life of Dublin city. Working with Dublin City Libraries she has given talks, lectures and interviews on literary subjects and has been a key supporter of and participant in the Dublin One City One Book initiative and The Dublin Writer’s Festival. She is also a published poet, and a painter.

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. In 2002 he published his first novel, Waiting for an Angel. Waiting for an Angel has been translated into many languages including Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French. His writing has won many prizes including the Caine Prize, 2001, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003. He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2006 he co-edited the British Council’s anthology, New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time, was published in February, 2007. He currently teaches Creative Writing at the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives with his family.

José Luis de Juan was born in Palma in 1956. He graduated in Law and International Relations in the universities of Barcelona and Johns Hopkins, working as a lawyer and civil servant in different organisations. Following a period of art activities, he began to publish his literary work in the 90s: six novels, short stories and two non-fiction books, as well as poetry. He has received literary awards in Spain and France. His works has been translated into English, French and Italian and presented in international literary festivals including Berlin (2004) and Edinburgh (the novel This breathing world, Arcadia 2007). He lives in Majorca.

Patricia Duncker was born in Jamaica and has lived most of her life in Northern Europe. She was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and is the author of four novels : Hallucinating Foucault (1996), winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize, James Miranda Barry (1999), The Deadly Space Between (2002) and Miss Webster and Cherif (2006) which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She has also written two collections of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (1997) and Seven Tales of Sex and Death (2003). She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.