John Grisham as a child dreamed of being a professional baseball player. After graduating from law school at Ole Miss in 1981, he went on to practice law for nearly a decade, specialising in criminal defense and personal injury litigation.

One day, Grisham overheard the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim and was inspired to start a novel exploring what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants. Getting up at 5 a.m. every day to get in several hours of writing time before heading off to work, Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987.

His next novel, The Firm, spent 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and became the bestselling novel of 1991. Since then, he has written one novel a year, including The Client, The Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker and The Runaway Jury.

Today, Grisham has written a collection of stories, a work of non-fiction, three sports novels, five kids' books, and many legal thrillers. His work has been translated into 42 languages. He lives near Charlottesville, Virginia.

In 1980 Jim McCloskey decided to leave the corporate world and enter the ministry. While a student chaplain at the Trenton State Prison he met George De Los Santos, a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder. Convinced of his innocence, McCloskey took on De Los Santos's case.

His efforts led to Dos Los Santos's exoneration and release from prison in 1983. In the same year McCloskey founded Centurion Ministries, the first non-profit organisation in the world dedicated to freeing individuals who are wrongfully incarcerated. Since then Centurion has been responsible for 70 releases of men and women serving life or death sentences for crimes they did not commit.

McCloskey's memoir, WHEN TRUTH IS ALL YOU HAVE, was published in 2020 with a Foreword from John Grisham.

He retired from Centurion in 2015