Toby Litt is an English writer and academic in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. His books includes two collections of short stories and several novels. In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists.
Sarah Hall is the author of Haweswater, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize. In 2004, her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her fourth novel, How To Paint A Dead Man, published in 2009, was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and won the 2010 Portico Prize. Her first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference (2011) won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2012 and the Edge Hill short story prize, and was also short-listed for the Frank O’Connor Prize. Sarah won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013 with Mrs Fox. Her latest novel, The Wolf Border, was published in 2015.
Junot Díaz is the author of Drown (1997) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. His most recent publication (in which ‘Miss Lora’ appears) is This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a collection of linked narratives about love told through the lives of New Jersey Dominicans, as they struggle to find a point where their two worlds meet. He is the recipient of a PEN/Malamud Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Born in Santo Domingo, Díaz is also a professor at MIT.
Ali Smith is the author of five collections of short stories and seven novels, including How to Be Both, which was shorlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and the Folio Prize and won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Novel Award in the 2014 Costa Book Awards. She was made a CBE in 2015.
Cynan Jones is a Welsh writer, who lives and works in Ceredigion. Jones published his first novel, The Long Dry, in 2006. He later published three novels between 2011 and 2014. His short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and publications such as Granta and New Welsh Review.
Mark Haddon is the author of three novels, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Red House. He has written scripts for TV and radio and a play, Polar Bears, for The Donmar Warehouse. The Pier Falls, a collection of his short stories will be published in May 2016.