Catherine Dunne is author of nine novels. The most recent, The Things We Know Now, won the 700th anniversary Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013. It has also recently been shortlisted for the Eason Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2013. Catherine has also published one work of non-fiction, a social history of Irish immigrants in London, called An Unconsidered People. She was awarded the International Prize at the Vigevano Literary Festival in Vigevano, Italy, in 2006, and has been shortlisted for, among others, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Italian Booksellers’ Award. Catherine Dunne lives in Dublin.

Giles Foden was born in in 1967 to Irish and English parents. He grew up mostly in Africa, spending his summer holidays in north Kerry. Between 1990 and 2006 he worked on newspapers and magazines in Britain, during which period he published his debut novel The Last King of Scotland, which won the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award. He is author of three other novels — Ladysmith, Zanzibar and Turbulence — and a work of narrative non-fiction, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth. Giles is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has been a judge on the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, and the MAN Booker Prize.

Maciej Świerkocki is a former academic teacher with a Ph.d. in comparative literature, currently an award-winning freelance translator, critic, screenwriter, novelist and editor. He has translated more than 50 books from English into Polish, including works by John Barth, Angela Carter, Cormac McCarthy, Ciaran Carson, Robert Graves, Richard Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, John Irving, Howard Jacobson, John Updike and W.B. Yeats. His prose was published in English in The Tampa Review and The Yellow Nib. His latest book, a collection of essays called Echa postmodernizmu [Echoes of Postmodernism] came out in 2010. Member of the Polish Writers’ Association and the Polish Film Academy. He lives and works in Łódź, Poland.

Maya Jaggi is an award-winning critic and cultural journalist in Britain who received an honorary doctorate from The Open University in 2012 for her outstanding contribution to education and culture over 25 years, especially in ‘extending the map of international writing.’ A longstanding profile writer and critic for the Guardian Review, she also writes for the Financial Times, Independent, Newsweek and Literary Review, and appears on BBC radio and television. Educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she has interviewed 12 Nobel prizewinners in literature, and judged literary awards including the Orange, David Cohen, Caine and Commonwealth Writers prizes. She chaired the Man Asian Literary Prize jury in Hong Kong in 2013.

Tash Aw is the author of three novels, The Harmony Silk Factory, Map of the Invisible World and Five Star Billionaire, which have won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes and twice been longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize, they have also been translated into twenty four languages. His short fiction has won an O. Henry Award and been published in A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, amongst others. He lives in London.