An acclaimed ballet choreographer and opera director, Mark Morris was born on August 29, 1956, in Seattle, Washington. He formed the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) in 1980 and has since created close to 150 works for the company. From 1988 to 1991, he was Director of Dance at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. In 1990, he founded the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Kirsty Logan is the author of the novel The Gracekeepers, the short story collections A Portable Shelter and The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales, the flash fiction chapbook The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive, and the short memoir The Old Asylum in the Woods at the Edge of the Town Where I Grew Up. Her books have won the Lambda Literary Award, the Polari First Book Prize, the Saboteur Award, the Scott Prize and the Gavin Wallace Fellowship, and been selected for the Radio 2 Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club. Her short fiction and poetry has been translated into Japanese and Spanish, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She lives in Glasgow with her wife.

Aliya Whiteley grew up in North Devon and developed an early passion for walking and observing nature. Today she writes about the natural world for Mental Floss and in her fiction, which has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award, among others.

Whiteley’s novella, The Beauty, depicted a future world in which a fungus interacts with humanity and creates a new form of life, leading readers all over the world to send her photographs and articles relating to mushrooms. Her new novel, Greensmith (May 2020), deals with seed banks and viruses, and the current global threat to diversity.

She was formerly the Deputy Editor of Explore – a magazine that tackles one subject in depth per issue, such as dinosaurs, the solar system or indeed plant-life. She walks through the woods and fields around her home in West Sussex every day, taking inspiration from the hidden worlds around her.

Chikodili Emelumadu was born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire and raised in Awka, Nigeria. A product of not one but two Nigerian boarding schools, she went on to attend Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Nigeria and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

She was the winner of the Curtis Brown First Novel Prize in 2019. Her work has also been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Awards (2015), a Nommo Award (2020) and the Caine Prize for African Literature (2017 & 2020).