Jim Butcher is the author of the Dresden Files, the Codex Alera and the Cinder Spires series. His resume includes a laundry list of skills which were useful a couple of centuries ago, and he plays guitar quite badly. An avid gamer, Jim plays tabletop games in varying systems, a variety of video games and LARPs whenever he can make time for it. He currently resides mostly inside his own head, but his head can generally be found in his home town of Independence, Missouri.

Rachel Caine is the author of over thirty novels, including the bestselling Morganville Vampires series. She has been an accountant, an insurance investigator and a professional musician, playing with such musical legends as Henry Mancini, Peter Nero and John Williams. She and her husband, fantasy artist R. Cat Conrad, live in Texas.

Sarah Beth Durst is the author of ten fantasy novels for adults, teens, and children, including The Lost, Vessel, and The Girl Who Could Not Dream. She was awarded the 2013 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has been a finalist for SFWA's Andre Norton Award three times.

She is a graduate of Princeton University, where she spent four years studying English, writing about dragons, and wondering what the campus gargoyles would say if they could talk. Sarah lives in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband and children.

Charlaine Harris is a New York Times bestselling author who has been writing for over thirty-five years. Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, she is the author of the Aurora Teagarden mysteries, basis for the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Aurora Teagarden original movies; the Midnight, Texas series, now a brand-new TV series; the Sookie Stackhouse urban fantasy series, basis for the HBO show True Blood; the Lily Bard mysteries; the Harper Connelly mysteries; and the co-author of the graphic novel trilogy Cemetery Girl. Harris now lives in Texas with her husband and two rescue dogs.

Mark Lawrence was born in Champagne-Urbanan, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. He went back to the US after taking a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College to work on a variety of research projects including the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence programme.

Returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He says he never had any ambition to be a writer so was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight.

His first trilogy, The Broken Empire, has been universally acclaimed as a ground-breaking work of fantasy, and both Emperor of Thorns and The Liar’s Key have won the Gemmell Legend award for best fantasy novel. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol.

Seanan McGuire is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, Alex and Locus Award-winning Wayward Children series, the October Daye series, the InCryptid series, and other works.

She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. Seanan lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls, horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard.

She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 became the first person to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot.

Naomi Novik is the acclaimed author of the Temeraire series and the multiple award-winning Uprooted. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award and has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, as well as the Locus Award for Best New Writer and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. She is also the author of the graphic novel Will Supervillains Be on the Final?

Fascinated with both history and legends, Novik is a first-generation American raised on Polish fairy tales and stories of Baba Yaga. Her own adventures include pillaging degrees in English literature and computer science from various ivory towers, designing computer games, and helping to build the Archive of Our Own for fanfiction and other fanworks. Novik is a co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works.

She lives in New York City with husband and Hard Case Crime founder Charles Ardai and their daughter, Evidence, surrounded by an excessive number of purring computers.

Anthony Ryan lives in London and is the New York Times bestselling author of the Raven's Shadow and Draconis Memoria series.

He previously worked in a variety of roles for the UK government, but now writes full time. His interests include art, science and the unending quest for the perfect pint of real ale.

Brandon Sanderson was born in Nebraska in 1975.

Since then he has written, amongst others The Mistborn books and begun the internationally bestselling Stormlight Archive.

He was also chosen by Robert Jordan's family to complete Jordan's Wheel of Time Sequence. He lives in Utah.

Django Wexler graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with degrees in creative writing and computer science, worked in artificial intelligence research and as a programmer/writer for Microsoft, and is now a full-time fantasy writer. Django is the author of The Shadow Campaigns, a flitlock fantasy series for adults, and The Forbidden Library, a classic fantasy series for middle-grade readers.

Janny Wurts is the author of the Cycle of Fire series, co-author of the worldwide bestselling Empire series with Raymond E. Feist, and is currently working on the Wars of Light and Shadow series.

She often paints her own covers and is also an expert horsewoman, sailor, musician and archer.