Jeet Thayil is a poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy, he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father, T.J.S. George, a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005, he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the DSC Prize, and became a bestseller. His book of poems These Errors Are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award. His musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry and short fiction have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS, Esquire, The London Magazine, The Guardian and The Paris Review, among other venues. Jeet Thayil's most recent book of poems is I'll Have It Here. 

John Kinsella has published over seventy books of poetry, fiction, criticism, plays, edited works (such as The Penguin Book of Australian Poetry) and collaborative works. His many awards include the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry (twice) and the Western Australian Premier's Award for Poetry (three times). Recent books include Insomnia: Poems (2019), Cell night: A Verse Novel (2023), the poetry collection Argonautica Inlandica (2023),and the three volumes of his collected poems, The Ascension of Sheep(2022), Harsh Hakea (2023) and