Dame Margaret Drabble was born in 1939. She is the author of seventeen highly acclaimed novels, including most recently The Pure Gold Baby.

She has also written biographies and screenplays, and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980 and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list.

Esther Freud trained as an actress before writing her first novel, Hideous Kinky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and made into a film starring Kate Winslet. After publishing her second novel, Peerless Flats, she was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young British novelists. Her other books include The Sea House, Lucky Break, and Mr Mac and Me, which won Best Novel in the East Anglian Book Awards.

She contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines, and teaches creative writing with her own local group. Her first full length play Stitchers was produced at the Jermyn St Theatre in 2018, and in 2019 she was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I Couldn't Love You More is her ninth novel. She lives in London.

Nell Frizzell is a journalist, writer and Vogue columnist.

She has written for The Guardian, VICE, The Telegraph, Elle, The Observer, Grazia, I-D among many others.

Her first book The Panic Years is an exploration of bodies, babies and the big questions facing modern life.

Eli Goldstone lives in Margate and is a graduate of the City University Creative Writing MA.

She is the former prose editor of Cadaverine.

Amy Key is a poet and writer based in London. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe and Isn't Forever, which was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and a Book of the Year in the Guardian, New Statesman and The Times.

Her poems have been widely published and anthologised, and her essays have appeared in At the Pond, Granta, the Poetry Review and elsewhere.

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Author Award. She received a doctorate in environmental history and aesthetics in 2016, and her first book, Turning, was published in 2017. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review. She lives in Berlin.

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018. She also won the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the 2016 Virago/Stylist Short Story competition, and has been published in Granta and TANK magazine among others.

Deborah Moggach is the author of many successful novels including Tulip Fever and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was made into a top-grossing film starring Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith.

Her screenplays include the film of Pride and Prejudice, which was nominated for a BAFTA. She lives in Wales.

Nina Mingya Powles is a writer, editor and publisher from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of the poetry collections field notes on a downpour, Luminescent and Magnolia, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is also the author of Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai.

In 2019 she won the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing, for Small Bodies of Water, and in 2018 she won the Women Poets' Prize. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon, a small press that publishes limited-edition pamphlets by Asian poets. She was born in Aotearoa, partly grew up in China, and now lives in London.

Sharlene Teo (b. 1987) is a Singaporean writer based in the UK. She is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award for Ponti, her first novel.

In 2012, she was awarded the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship to undertake an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she is doing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing.

She is the recipient of the 2013 David T.K Wong Creative Writing Fellowship and the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellowship.