John Boyne was born in Dublin in 1971. He is the author of 8 novels, including the international bestsellers Mutiny On The Bounty, The House of Special Purpose and The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, which sold 5 million copies worldwide, topped the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a Miramax feature film. His second children’s novel, Noah Barleywater Runs Away, was published in October 2010. His books are published in over 40 languages.

Michael Hofmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1957, and moved to England in 1961. He went to schools in Bristol, Edinburgh and Winchester, and studied at Cambridge for seven years. Since 1983, he has been a   freelance writer and reviewer. In 1993, he was offered a teaching post at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He lives in Hamburg and London.He is the author of four books of poems and a Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2008), a book of criticism called Behind the Lines (Faber and Faber, 2001), and the translator of many German authors, including Brecht, Kafka, Jünger and Roth. In 1998, his translation of Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Among his recent translations are Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (Penguin) and Angina Days (Princeton U.P.), the selected poems of Günter Eich.

Born in Calgary, Alberta in 1953, Nancy Huston has been living in Paris since 1973. She writes both fiction and non-fiction, in both French and English, translating herself in both directions. Her novels have won numerous prizes, including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens (France), the Prix Elle (Québec) and the Governor General’s Award (Canada). Published in 2006 in French and in 2008 in English, Fault Lines, her eleventh novel, was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize in Great Britain and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in Canada. Distinguished by the Prix Femina in France, it became an international bestseller has been translated into nearly forty languages.

Susan Bassnett is a writer and professor of comparative literature at the University of Warwick. She is the author of over 20 books, which include translations, collections of her poetry,and academic writing. Recent publications include a study of Ted Hughes(2009)and a co-authored book on translation and global news (2010). A collection of her short essays , Reflections on Translation; will appear in 2011. She travels all over the world to give lectures and run workshops, but always finds time for her children, grandchildren and beloved dogs.

Tessa Hadley has written three novels: Accidents in the Home, published by Jonathan Cape 2002, and by Holt in the US (longlisted for the Guardian First Book award); Everything Will Be All Right, Holt 2003, Cape 2004 (shortlisted for the Encore Award); and The Master Bedroom, Cape and Holt 2007 (longlisted for the Orange). A new novel, The London Train, will be out in January 2011. She has had stories published in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Guardian, and published a collection of stories, Sunstroke, in 2007 (Cape and Picador US, shortlisted for the Story Prize in the US). She reviews for The London Review of Books and The Guardian, and was Chair of the Editorial Board of New Welsh Review from 2005-8. Tessa is also a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa University, where she teaches on the MA in Creative Writing, courses on The Short Story, and Writing and Politics. Her book on Henry James, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002.