Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don't Cry, and the novels Veronica, The Mare and Two Girls Fat and Thin. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories.

Hari Kunzru is the author of The Impressionist, Transmission and the short story collection Noise, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, 2003.

He is a contributing editor of Mute magazine and sits on the executive council of English Pen. He lives in East London.

Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels- Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France's Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; Ugly Man; and The Marbled Swarm. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris. He is the director (with Zac Farley) of Permanent Green Light and Like Cattle Towards Glow.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of four other novels, most recently The Corrections and Freedom, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Edwidge Danticat's collection of interlinked stories, KRIK? KRAK!, was shortlisted for the National Book Award in the US. She was also one of GRANTA's Best Young American Novelists.

Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper's and the Paris Review.

Marcus has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on the faculty at Columbia University in New York.

A.M. Homes is the author of the novels May We Be Forgiven, which won the Women's Prize 2013, This Book Will Save Your Life, a Richard and Judy pick in 2007, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers and Jack, two collections of short stories, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, and the highly acclaimed memoir The Mistress's Daughter, as well as the travel memoir Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill.

She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and writes frequently on arts and culture for numerous magazines and newspapers. She lives in New York City.

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of two internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award) and Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the iconic essay The Hatred of Poetry. In 2011, he became the first American to win the Munster Prize for International Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

Sam Lipsyte, b.1968, is an American novelist and short story writer.

He is the author of the short story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts (Granta, 2013) and three novels: The Subject Steve, Home Land, and The Ask, which was a New York Times Notable Book.

He lives New York.

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities.

His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993 to great acclaim and he has received numerous awards for his work.

In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and France’s Prix Medicis and has sold more than 3 million copies.

Wayne Koestenbaum is a cultural critic and academic based in New York.

Sir Wilson Harris was a prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and lecturer. Born in 1921 in British Guiana, his father died when he was two and his stepfather disappeared into the rainforests in 1929. He began working as a government surveyor in 1942 and led expeditions into the Amazonian interior for almost 15 years.

In 1959 he left for England to become a full-time writer. The following year, T.S. Eliot published his debut novel, Palace of the Peacock, which became a landmark of Caribbean literature and the first of The Guyana Quartet. Over the course of his career, Faber published all 26 of Harris' novels, including The Carnival Trilogy, Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar, and The Ghost of Memory. Harris was awarded numerous academic fellowships and honorary doctorates as well as being a Guggenheim Fellow.

He twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature as well as a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Harris was knighted in 2010, and died in 2018 at the age of 96.

Francisco Goldman has published five novels and two books of non-fiction. His books have been published in 16 languages. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the NY Public Library and a Berlin Fellow at the American Academy. He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Believer and many other publications. He lives in Mexico City.

Geoff Dyer is the author of ten non-fiction books and four novels. He has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E.M. Forster Award.

In 2012 he won a National Book Critics Circle Award and in 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and several collections of short fiction, the latest of which is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.

She is also the translator of numerous works from the French by, among others, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Leiris, and was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

Jim Shepard is the National Book Award-finalist and highly acclaimed author of seven novels and five collections of stories, including The Book of Aron and Like You'd Understand, Anyway.

He lives in Massachusetts with his family and teaches creative writing at the historic liberal arts establishment Williams College.

Widely acclaimed as one of the US's finest writers, The World to Come is the first collection of his short stories to be published in the UK.

Jennifer Egan is the author of A Visit From The Goon Squad, The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City.

Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her non-fiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.