Salley Vickers is the author of several bestselling novels including Miss Garnet's Angel, Mr Golightly's Holiday, The Other Side of You and Dancing Backwards.

Her most recent books are The Cleaner of Chartres (Viking 2012) and short story collection The Boy Who Could See Death (Viking 2015). She has worked as a cleaner, a dancer, a teacher of children with special needs, a university lecturer and a psychoanalyst. She now writes and lectures full time.

Marina Warner's study of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic (2011) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2013; in 2015 she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities and was made DBE.

She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Fellow of the British Academy and President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Jo Baker is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Longbourn (which is due for release as a feature film in 2020) and A Country Road, A Tree. Her new novel, The Body Lies, is both a rivetting cat-and-mouse game and a disarming exploration of sexual politics. It has been optioned for TV. Jo Baker lives with her family in Lancashire.

Maggie Gee has written 15 books to great acclaim including The White Family and Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, and her work has been translated into 14 languages.

In 2012 there was an international conference about her work at St Andrew’s University. One of Granta’s original ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been shortlisted for global prizes including the Orange (now Women’s) Prize, and the Dublin International IMPAC Prize.

She writes novels, short stories, memoir, poetry and journalism, is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, a Director of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. Maggie Gee was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2012. She lives in London WC1, and Ramsgate, Kent.

Jill Dawson is the author of the novels Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, Wild Boy, Watch Me Disappear, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, The Great Lover, Lucky Bunny, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Crime Writer, which won the East Anglian Book of the Year. An award-winning poet, she has also edited several poetry and short story anthologies.

Jill Dawson has held many Fellowships, including the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. In 2008 she founded a mentoring scheme for new writers, Gold Dust. She lives in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

Catherine Fox is one of Australia's leading commentators on women and the workforce.

She wrote the 'Corporate Woman' column for the Australian Financial Review for many years and has written three previous books, including Seven Myths about Women and Work (NewSouth), which was shortlisted for the 2013 Ashurst Business Literature Prize.

She helped establish the annual Westpac/Financial Review 100 Women of Influence Awards and is on several advisory boards, including the Australian Defence Force Gender Equality Advisory Board.