Christine Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin. The Lives of Women will be published in May 2015 and will be her 8th book. The Cold Eye of Heaven won the Irish Novel of the Year of the Year 2012 and was nominated for the IMPAC 2013 award. Her novel Last Train from Liguria was shortlisted for the Prix L’Européen de Littérature and her novel Tatty was chosen as one of the 50 Irish Books of the Decade as well as being nominated for The Orange Prize. Her first novel The Dancer was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year. In March 2014 her first play, Snow Angels, was staged at the Project Theatre Dublin and played to full houses and critical acclaim. Christine is a member of Aosdana.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some forty books to his name. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award. Forthcoming books include the new Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature and translations of novels from Angola, Guatemala and Brazil. He is currently chair of the Society of Authors, and on the board of a number of organisations that deal with literature and free speech.

Jordi Soler was born in 1963 in La Portuguesa, a community of Catalan exiles located in the jungle of Veracruz, Mexico. He currently lives in Barcelona and is a regular contributor to several newspapers and magazines in Spain and México. Soler has published books of poems, story collections, and ten novels translated in to several languages. Los rojos de ultramar ( 2004), La última hora del último día ( 2007) and La fiesta del oso (2009) are a trilogy of novels that the author devoted to his family, forced to emigrate to Mexico during the Spanish Civil War. The trilogy was published in a single volume entitled La guerra perdida, and was awarded in France with the Prix Littéraire des Jeunes Européens (2012).

Kate Pullinger is a novelist and digital writer. Her 2009 novel ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction; it was long listed for both the Giller Prize and IMPAC Dublin. Her new novel, ‘Landing Gear’ was published in 2014. She has been at the forefront of literary digital innovation for more than a decade; her on-going web project ‘Inanimate Alice’ and her 2014 digital war memorial ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’ have gathered readers and writers around the world. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University.  Find her at www.katepullinger.com

Valentine Cunningham (British) is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and Tutor and Senior Fellow in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
He has lectured widely around the world and has been a Visiting Professor in the USA, Australia and Germany (where he was Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Konstanz for ten years). He reviews widely for various British and American journals and newspapers, and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio on literary and musicological topics. He has twice been a judge for the Booker Prize (1992 and 1998), and was a Regional Chair for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region) in 1999 and 2000. His most recent book is Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems and Poetics (2011).