Sheila Armstrong is a writer from the north-west of Ireland. She is the author of two books: How To Gut A Fish, a collection of short stories, and Falling Animals, a novel.
Max Porter’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It has been sold in twenty-nine territories. Complicité and Wayward’s production of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy opened in Dublin in March 2018. Max lives in Bath with his family.
Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in Merseyside. He is the author of five novels, the latest of which, SEASCRAPER, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. His first book won France's Prix du Roman Fnac and Prix Baudelaire in 2014. His other works have been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Costa First Novel Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award, the European Union Prize for Literature, the Commonwealth Book Award, and the RSL Encore Award. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King's College London, where he teaches fiction modules and founded the PhD in Creative Writing programme. He lives in Surrey with his wife and sons.
ORLANDO WHITFIELD is a writer and a failed art dealer based in London. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times (UK), The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, and British GQ. His first book, All That Glitters, was shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards 2024.
Lisa McInerney’s work has featured in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, Granta and BBC Radio 4 and in the anthologies Beyond The Centre, The Long Gaze Back and Town and Country. Her debut novel The Glorious Heresies won the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2016 Desmond Elliott Prize. Her second novel, The Blood Miracles, is published by John Murray in April 2017.
Richard Scott grew up in London and studied at the Royal College of Music and at Goldsmiths College. After working as an opera singer and presenting The Opera Hour on Resonance FM, Richard went on to win the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and become a Jerwood/Arvon Poetry mentee, a member of the Aldeburgh 8 and an Open Spaces artist resident at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. His pamphlet Wound (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016 and his poem ‘crocodile’ won the 2017 Poetry London Competition. Soho is his first book and took ten years to write.
