A.M. Homes is the author of five novels, two collections of short stories, a travel volume and the internationally acclaimed memoir, The Mistress's Daughter. Her fiction has been translated into twenty languages and she is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment For the Arts Fellowship. A writer/producer of the hit television show The L Word, she is currently developing her own series for HBO and is also currently Treasurer of The Pen American Center in New York and active on the Board of Directors of Yaddo, The Writers Room, and Poets and Writers.

Ian Jack is a writer and editor. From 1995 to 2007 he edited the literary magazine Granta and from 1991 to 1995 the Independent on Sunday, of which he was a co-founder. He began his career as a journalist on newspapers in Scotland and for sixteen years worked at the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent, mainly in the Indian Subcontinent. He has reviewed books for many periodicals, including the New York Times and the London Review of Books. His own books are Before the Oil Ran Out (1987) and The Crash That Stopped Britain (2001). He writes a weekly column for the Guardian.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of Reading To You, a poetry collection, two books of essays, Mysteries Of The Rectangle: Essays On Painting and A Plea For Eros, as well as four novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, the international bestseller, What I Loved, and most recently, The Sorrows of an American (2008). Her work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.