Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Dan Rhodes is an English writer, possibly best known for the novel Timoleon Vieta Come Home (2003), a subversion of the popular Lassie Come Home movie. He is also the author of Anthropology (2000), a collection of 101 stories, each consisting of exactly 101 words. In 2010 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award.
Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Tash Aw, whose full name is Aw Ta-Shi is a Malaysian writer living in London.
Alan Kent Haruf was an American novelist.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Tahmima Anam is a Bangladeshi-born British writer, novelist and columnist. Her first novel, A Golden Age (2007), was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. Her follow-up novel, The Good Muslim, was nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is the granddaughter of Abul Mansur Ahmed and daughter of Mahfuz Anam.
Kate Pullinger is a Canadian novelist and author of digital fiction, and a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, England. She was born 1961 in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Canada, and went to high school on Vancouver Island. She dropped out of McGill University, Montreal, after a year and a half and subsequently worked for a year in a copper mine in the Yukon. She then travelled and settled in London, where she now resides.
João Guilherme Biehl is a Brazilian anthropologist who is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is also the Co-Director of the Program of Global Health and Health Policy and where he holds an Old Dominion Professorship at the Council of Humanities, as well as being a Visitor at the School of Social Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study. He specializes in medical anthropology, and his interests include social studies of science and religion, psychological anthropology, globalization and development, global health, ethnographic methods, critical theory, and Brazilian and Latin American societies. He is the winner of the Rudolf Virchow Award given by the Society for Medical Anthropology, the Margaret Mead Award in 2007, the Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005, and Princeton Universities' Graduate Mentoring Award in 2012.
Julian Baggini is a philosopher, journalist and the author of over 20 books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is co-founder of The Philosophers' Magazine and has written for numerous international newspapers and magazines. In addition to writing on the subject of philosophy he has also written books on atheism, secularism and the nature of national identity. He is a patron of Humanists UK.
Nadifa Mohamed is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on Granta magazine's list "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. Her 2021 novel, The Fortune Men, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, making her the first British Somali novelist to get this honour. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including The Guardian, and contributed poetry to the anthology New Daughters of Africa. She was also a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London until 2021. She will be Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University in Spring 2022.
Steven James is the author of more than forty books, including the critically acclaimed Bowers Files, an eleven-book series of psychological thrillers that consists of Opening Moves, Every Crooked Path, Every Deadly Kiss, Every Wicked Man, The Pawn, The Rook, The Knight, The Bishop, The Queen, The King, and Checkmate. The series has received four Christy Awards and numerous other honors.
Richard Van Camp is a Dogrib Tłı̨chǫ writer of the Dene nation from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, Canada. He is best known for his 1996 novel The Lesser Blessed, which was adapted into a film by director Anita Doron in 2012.
Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and assistant editor at Penguin. She is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
Subrata Dasgupta is a bi-cultural multidisciplinary scholar, scientist, and writer. Born in Calcutta, he was educated in England, India, and Canada.
Richard Appignanesi is a Canadian writer and editor. He was the originating editor of the internationally successful illustrated For Beginners book series, as well as the author of several of the series' texts. He is a founding publisher and editor of Icon Books. He was founding editor of the Manga Shakespeare series. He is a former executive editor of the journal Third Text, and reviews editor of the policy studies journal Futures.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. Her debut novel Homegoing, published in 2016, won her, at the age of 26, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first book of fiction, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020.
Sarah Moss is an English writer and academic. She has published six novels, as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin's School of English, Drama and Film in the Republic of Ireland with effect from September 2020.
Chit Oo Nyo is a Burmese writer, novelist, script-writer and academic. He is considered a gifted author of Myanmar literature in the 20th century.
