Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. She was raised in the Mojave Desert, first in Tecopa, California and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, the New York Times and elsewhere. Claire has received fellowships from the Writers’ Conferences at Sewanee and Bread Loaf. Her collection of short stories, Battleborn (Riverhead Books), won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Battleborn was named a best book of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Time Out New York, Flavorwire, and NPR.org. In 2012, Claire was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” Currently a visiting assistant professor at Princeton University, Claire is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

Mieko Kawakami (川上未映子, born in August 29, 1976) is a Japanese singer and writer from Osaka. She was awarded the 138th Akutagawa Prize for promising new writers of serious fiction (2007) for her novel Chichi to Ran (乳と卵) (Breasts and Eggs). Kawakami has released three albums and three singles as a singer.

Pola Oloixarac (Buenos Aires, 13 de septiembre de 1977) es una escritora y traductora argentina. Estudió Filosofía en la Universidad de Buenos Aires y ha publicado artículos sobre arte y tecnología en medios como The Telegraph, The New York Times International, Folha de Sao Paulo, Página 12, Revista Quimera, Etiqueta Negra, Qué Leer, Revista Alfa, América Economía y Brando. Su primera novela es Las teorías salvajes (Entropía, 2008; Alpha Decay 2010; Estruendomudo, 2010), próximamente en traducción al inglés (Jonathan Cape), francés (Editions du Seuil), holandés (Meulenhoff), finlandés (Sammakko), italiano (Baldini Castoldi Dalai), y portugués (en Brasil, Saraiva; en Portugal, Quetzal). En el 2010 fue seleccionada entre Los mejores narradores en español por la Revista Granta (Best of Young Spanish Novelists, Granta 113 UK). En el año 2010 participó en el International Writers Program de la Universidad de Iowa gracias a una beca del Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US State Department. En el 2010 recibió la Beca Nacional de Letras del Fondo Nacional de las Artes de Argentina. Publicó cuentos en antologías en Suiza y Argentina, como Acerca de la comunidad de hipotálamos y el código Morse en la antología Literatura Fantástica Argentina (Ed. Pagina 12, 2004) y Die Nacht des Kometen. Argentinische Autorinnen der Gegenwart.

Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. John Freeman is an award-winning writer and book critic who has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. Freeman won the 2007 James Patterson Pageturner Award for his work as the president of the National Book Critics Circle, and was the editor of Granta from 2009 to 2013. He lives in New York City, where he teaches at NYU and edits a new literary biannual called Freeman's.

Ocean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon and Justin Trudeau, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, VICE, The Fantastic Man, and The New Yorker. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst.

Heather O'Neill was born in Montreal and attended McGill University. She published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel won the Canada Reads competition (2007) and was awarded the Hugh Maclennan Award (2007). It was nominated for eight other awards included the Orange Prize, the Governor General's Award and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize. It was an international bestseller. Her books The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (2014) and Daydreams of Angels (2015) were both shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Her third novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel will be published in February 2017. Her credits also include a screenplay, a book of poetry, and contributions to The New York Times Magazine, This American Life, The Globe and Mail, Elle Magazine, The Walrus and Rookie Magazine.

Fiona McFarlane grew up in Sydney, Australia. She studied English at Sydney University and completed a PhD on nostalgia in American fiction at Cambridge University. She spent 3 years at writing residencies in the US - at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire - before studying for a Masters of Fine Arts in Fiction at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. Fiona's first novel, The Night Guest, will be published in 19 countries and 15 languages, and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Stella Prize, an LA Times Book Review prize, an INDIE Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and an Australian Book Industry Award. The Night Guest won a NSW Premier's Prize and Fiona was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist for 2014. Fiona's short stories have been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Southerly, Best Australian Stories, New Australian Stories 2, the Missouri Review and the New Yorker. She is currently completing a collection, to be published by Penguin Australia, Sceptre (UK) and Faber and Faber (US).

Andrés Felipe Solano es novelista y periodista. Autor de la novelas Sálvame, Joe Louis (Alfaguara, 2007) y Los hermanos Cuervo (Alfaguara, 2012). Sus artículos han aparecido en diversas publicaciones como SoHo, Arcadia, Gatopardo (México), La Tercera (Chile), Babelia-El País (España), Granta (España, Reino Unido), The New York Times Magazine y Words Without Borders (Estados Unidos). En 2008 fue finalista del Premio Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, institución presidida por Gabriel García Márquez, por su crónica Seis meses con el salario mínimo, que fue incluida en Lo mejor del periodismo en América Latina (FNPI-FCE, 2009) y en Antología de crónica latinoamericana actual (Alfaguara, 2012). En 2016, gana el premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana por su obra Corea: apuntes desde la cuerda floja (Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2015). Andrés Felipe Solano es uno de los mejores narradores jóvenes en español según la revista GRANTA. Elegido como uno de los Nuevos Cronistas de Indias por la Fundación Nuevo Periodismo, presidida por Gabriel García Márquez.

Sayaka Murata (in Japanese, 村田 沙耶香) is one of the most exciting up-and-coming writers in Japan today. She herself still works part time in a convenience store, which gave her the inspiration to write Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen). She debuted in 2003 with Junyu (Breastfeeding), which won the Gunzo Prize for new writers. In 2009 she won the Noma Prize for New Writers with Gin iro no uta (Silver Song), and in 2013 the Mishima Yukio Prize for Shiro-oro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City). Convenience Store Woman won the 2016 Akutagawa Award. Murata has two short stories published in English (both translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori): "Lover on the Breeze" (Ruptured Fiction(s) of the Earthquake, Waseda Bungaku, 2011) and "A Clean Marriage" (Granta 127: Japan, 2014).

Garnette Cadogan is an essayist. He was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar (2017-2018) at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, in addition to being a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the editor-at-large of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (co-edited by Rebecca Solnit and IPK Fellow Joshua Jelly-Schapiro) and is at work on a book on walking.

Sunjeev Sahota is a British novelist. Sahota was born in 1981 in Derby, and his family moved to Chesterfield when he was seven years old. His paternal grandparents had emigrated to Britain from the Punjab in 1966. After finishing school, Sahota studied mathematics at Imperial College London. As of January 2011, he was working in marketing for the insurance company Aviva. Sahota had not read a novel until he was 18 years old, when he read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children while visiting relatives in India before starting university. After Midnight's Children, Sahota went on to read The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy and The Remains of the Day. In an interview in January 2011, he stated: It was like I was making up for lost time – not that I had to catch up, but it was as though I couldn't quite believe this world of storytelling I had found and I wanted to get as much of it down me as I possibly could. In 2013 he was included in the Granta list of 20 best young British writers. Sahota's first novel, Ours are the Streets, was published in January 2011 by Picador. He wrote the book in the evenings and at weekends because of his day job. The novel tells the story of a British Pakistani youth who becomes a suicide bomber. His second novel, The Year of the Runaways, about the experience of illegal immigrants in Britain, was published in June 2015.

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa (now in the Republic of Somaliland) in 1981 and moved as a child to England in 1986, staying permanently when war broke out in Somalia. She lives in London and her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, based on her father's memories of his travels in the 1930s, was published in 2010. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. It won the 2010 Betty Trask Prize.