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.

Diana Souhami is the author of many widely acclaimed books, and she has also written plays for radio and television. She won the Whitbread Biography Award for Selkirk's Island. She lives in the UK.

John Baxter is an acclaimed film critic and biographer. His subjects have included Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick and Robert De Niro. He is the author of A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, and the memoir We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light. Born in Australia, he now lives in Paris.

Victoria Glendinning is the award-winning biographer of Leonard Woolf, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West and Jonathan Swift. Her previous novels, The Grown-Ups and Electricity, were critical and commercial successes. She is a past President of English PEN and a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Somerset.