Aliette de Bodard is one of the Writers of the Future, has won two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a BSFA Award. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards, making her one of our most-lauded contemporary fiction writers.

A writer by night, by day she is a qualified engineer, specialising in Applied Mathematics. She lives in Paris, in a flat with more computers than she really needs.

Gwyneth Jones lives in Brighton with her husband and son. She won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for BOLD AS LOVE; CASTLES MADE OF SAND was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award.

She is the previous winner of the James Tiptree Memorial Award and two World Fantasy Awards; four of her previous books have been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award

Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He is the author of Luna: New Moon and Luna: Wolf Moon. He has won the Locus Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He now lives in Belfast.

Yoon Ha Lee (yoonhalee.com) is the author of several critically acclaimed short stories and the Machineries of Empire trilogy for adults: Ninefox Gambit, Raven Strategem, and Revenant Gun. Yoon draws inspiration from a variety of sources, e.g. Korean history and mythology, fairy tales, higher mathematics, classic moral dilemmas, and genre fiction.

Sean Williams is a multi-award-winning, #1 New York Times best-selling author for readers of all ages. With over four million published words, in the form of series, novels, short stories and poems that have been translated into multiple languages for readers around the world, he has worked with visual artists, dramaturges, composers and other writers on collaborative works that include stories set in the Star Wars and Doctor Who universes, original series created with Garth Nix, and a science-fiction musical performed at the National Museum in Canberra.

In 2017, he was the recipient of the Australian Antarctica Division's annual Arts Fellowship. His most recent novels Impossible Music and Her Perilous Mansion were nominated for the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature and the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature respectively. Both are Children's Book Council of Australia Notable Books. As well as being a senior lecturer at Flinders University, he writes articles about creative writing; composes music that has been released internationally and commissioned for exhibitions, live performances, and the stage; and cooks a mean Brussels sprout.

Jonathan Strahan has co-edited The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy series of anthologies for HarperCollins Australia, co-edits the Science Fiction: The Best of...and Fantasy: The Best of...anthology series with Karen Haber for Simon & Schuster/ibooks, edits the Best Short Novels anthology series for the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, and co-edited The Locus Awards for Eos with Charles N. Brown. He is also the Reviews Editor for Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Fields, and reviews for the magazine regularly. He is currently working on The New Space Opera II.