Eric Brown is the BSFA award-winning author of more than 20 novels and as many novellas. Hehas had many short stories published in Interzone magazine and was, for many years, the SF and Fantasy reviewer for The Guardian

Nina Allan is a novelist and short story writer. Her previous fiction has won several prizes, including the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel, the Novella Award and the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire for Best Translated Work. She lives and works in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute. The Dollmaker is her third novel.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the epic science fiction blockbuster Children of Time.

He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British Fantasy Society Award, and been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award.

In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist.

Genevieve Cogman started on Tolkien and Sherlock Holmes at an early age, and has never looked back. But on a perhaps more prosaic note, she has an MSc in Statistics with Medical Applications and has wielded this in an assortment of jobs: clinical coder, data analyst and classifications specialist.

Although The Invisible Library was her debut novel, she previously worked as a freelance roleplaying game writer. She is also the author of The Masked City, The Burning Page and The Lost Plot, all in The Invisible Library series. Genevieve Cogman's hobbies include patchwork, beading, knitting and gaming, and she lives in the north of England.

Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He is the author of Luna: New Moon and Luna: Wolf Moon. He has won the Locus Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He now lives in Belfast.

Bryony was a winner of the 2008 Undiscovered Voices competition and is the author of ANGEL'S FURY and THE WEIGHT OF SOULS, winner of the Wirral Grammar School Award - Best Science Fiction. She has written PHOENIX RISING, PHOENIX BURNING and SAVAGE ISLAND for Stripes. Bryony lives with her husband and two children in a village in Gloucestershire.

Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland in 1960 and now lives in Somerset. He began writing in 1987, and sold his first short story to Fear magazine in 1988. He has written many bestselling novels, including the Greg Mandel series, the Night's Dawn trilogy, the Commonwealth Saga, the Void trilogy, The Chronicle of the Fallers, short story collections and several standalone novels including Fallen Dragon and Great North Road.