Peter Ames Carlin is a writer and the author of several books, including Bruce, a biography of Bruce Springsteen published in 2012.

Carlin has also been a free-lance journalist, a senior writer at People in New York City, and a television columnist and feature writer at The Oregonian in Portland.

A regular speaker on music, art and popular culture, Carlin lives in Portland, Ore., with his wife and three children.

Gillian G. Gaar has written thirteen books, including The Doors: The Illustrated History, She's A Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll, Entertain Us: The Rise of Nirvana, and Return of the King: Elvis Presley's Great Comeback.

She was a contributor to Voyageur Press' Nirvana: The Complete Illustrated History and has also written for numerous publications, including Mojo, Rolling Stone, and Goldmine. She lives and writes in Seattle.

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He published his first collection of poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (2006).

Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. From 1999 to 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Richard Russo is the author of eight previous novels, two collections of stories, a collection of essays and the memoir On Helwig Street. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which like Nobody's Fool was adapted to film, in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries; in 2016 he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association; and in 2017 he received France's Grand Prix de Litterature Americaine. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Wesley Stace has published four novels, including the international bestseller Misfortune. He recorded seventeen records under the name John Wesley Harding before reverting to his birth name for Self-Titled in 2013. His show Wesley Stace's Cabinet of Wonders has been a fixture in New York City and beyond for ten years

In 2011 Wayne Swan was named Euromoney Finance Minister of the Year.

He was federal Treasurer from 2007 to 2013 and has been the member for Lilley since 1993.

He is the author of Postcode: the Splintering of a Nation (2005), and the much read and hugely influential essay '0.01 Per Cent: The Rising Influence of Vested Interests'.