Hannu Rajaniemi is from Finland and has a PhD in String Theory. He lived, taught and worked in Edinburgh for many years where he was a member of the high profile writing group that also included Hal Duncan and Alan Campbell. He currently lives in California.

His first novel, The Quantum Thief was widely and hugely praised and has been published in several countries. As well as writing novels he also works in the areas of number and game theory and artificial intelligence.

Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent SF writer of his generation. With Terry Pratchett he has co-authored the Long Earth novels. Published around the world he has also won major awards in the UK, US, Germany, and Japan. Born in 1957 he has degrees from Cambridge and Southampton. He lives in Northumberland with his wife.

Lavie Tidhar (The Bookman; A Man Lies Dreaming; The Violent Century) is the author of the breakout Campbell and Neukom award-winning novel Central Station, which has been translated into ten languages.

He has also received the British Science Fiction, Neukom Literary, and World Fantasy awards. Tidhar was born in Israel, grew up on a kibbutz, has lived in south Africa, Laos, and Vanuatu, and currently resides in London.

Fran Wilde is an author and technology consultant. In 2015, her debut novel, Updraft, won the Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and was nominated for the Best Novel Nebula Award.

While not working on her Bone Universe books, Wilde writes short stories for various popular SFF publications and blogs about food and genre for Cooking the Books, the popular social-parenting website GeekMom, and at The Washington Post.

Naomi Kritzer is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and several novels for adults, including two trilogies for Bantam.

Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” was a Locus Award and Hugo Award winner and a finalist for the Nebula Award. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Justina Robson is an Arthur C. Clarke shortlisted author of ten SFF novels, including the highly regarded Quantum Gravity series, and was one of the first writers to win amazon.co.uk's Writer's Bursary in 2000.

Based in Leeds, she's been shortlisted for multiple international awards and is a sought-after creative writing teacher who has taught at the Arvon Foundation. A graduate of the Clarion West workshops in Seattle (1996) she has been invited to teach there also, though she hasn't made it yet for various practical reasons.

She acted as a judge for the Arthur C Clarke awards on behalf of the Science Fiction Foundation in 2006. Her most recently published novel is Glorious Angels, shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Best Novel 2015.

Kelly Robson's Tor.com novella Waters of Versailles won the Aurora Award, and was a finalist for both the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award.

She has also been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Sunburst Award. Her work has been selected for numerous Year's Best anthologies.

Kelly lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

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.

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St Andrews Universities and has a Ph.D. in astronomy.

He stopped working as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency to become a full-time writer.

Revelation Space and Pushing Ice were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Revelation Space, Absolution Gap, Diamond Dogs and Century Rain were shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award and Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award.

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.