Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty works, including fiction, poetry and critical essays, and her books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She has won many literary awards and prizes.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of three collections of stories and three novels. Hotel World was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize in 2001 and her latest novel, The Accidental, won the 2006 Whitbread Novel Award. Ali reviews regularly for the Guardian, the Scotsman and the TLS.

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an award-winning writer, living in Canada with her family. Her novels are Room, The Sealed Letter, Landing, Life Mask, Slammerkin, Hood and Stir-fry; short-story collections Astray, Three and a Half Deaths (UK ebook), Touchy Subjects, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, and Kissing the Witch; and literary history including Inseparable, We Are Michael Field, and Passions Between Women as well as two anthologies that span the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Frog Music, her new novel, comes out in Spring 2014.

Caroline O'Donoghue is a New York Times best-selling author and the host of the award-winning podcast Sentimental Garbage. She has written two novels for adults, Promising Young Women and Scenes of a Graphic Nature, as well as the supernatural series for teenagers, All Our Hidden Gifts. She currently lives in London.

Linda Grant is author of four non-fiction books and nine novels. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000. The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and went on to win the South Bank Show Award. . Her latest novel, The Story of the Forest, is published in 2023. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the University of York and John Moores University.