Born, 20th April, 1958, Simon Clark is the author of such highly regarded horror novels as Nailed By The Heart, Blood Crazy, Darker, Vampyrrhic and The Fall, while his short stories have been collected in Blood & Grit and Salt Snake & Other Bloody Cuts. He has also written prose material for the internationally famous rock band U2. Raised in a family of storytellers – family legend told of a stolen human skull buried beneath the Clark garage – he sold his first ghost story to a radio station in his teens. Before becoming a full-time writer he held a variety of day jobs, that have involved strawberry picking, supermarket shelf stacking, office work, and scripting video promos. He lives with his wife and two children in mystical territory that lies on the border of Robin Hood country in England.

Louise Cooper was born in Hertfordshire in 1952. She began writing stories when she was at school to entertain her friends. She hated school so much, in fact—spending most lessons clandestinely writing stories—that she persuaded her parents to let her abandon her education at the age of fifteen and has never regretted it. She continued to write and her first full-length novel was published when she was only twenty years old. She moved to London in 1975 and worked in publishing before becoming a full-time writer in 1977. Since then she has become a prolific writer of fantasy, renowned for her bestselling Time Master trilogy. She has published more than eighty fantasy and supernatural novels, both for adults and children. She also wrote occasional short stories for anthologies, and has co-written a comedy play that was produced for her local school. Louise Cooper lived in Cornwall with her husband, Cas Sandall, and their black cat, Simba. She gained a great deal of writing inspiration from the coast and scenery, and her other interests included music, folklore, cooking, gardening and "messing about on the beach." Just to make sure she keeps busy, she was also treasurer of her local Lifeboat station. Louise passed away suddenly from a brain aneurysm on Tuesday, October 20, 2009. She was a wonderful and talented lady and will be greatly missed.

Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil. An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence—Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha—not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith. In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche—perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel. Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.

Simon A. Forward is an author and dramatist most famous for his work on a variety of Doctor Who spin-offs. He currently lives and works in Penzance with his wife as a full-time writer. Forward specialises in sci-fi novels such as Doctor Who. His most recent work is Evil Unlimited for the Kindle. Simon's first published work was the short story One Bad Apple in BBC Books' Doctor Who anthology More Short Trips (BBC Books, 1999). Following this, Simon had a proposal for a Past Doctor Adventure accepted, and the subsequent novel, Drift, was published by BBC Books in 2002. Having a successful novel behind him, Simon contacted Gary Russell about the possibility of writing for Big Finish's range of audio adventures. The enquiry resulted in him writing the audio play The Sandman (Big Finish, 2002). Simon went on from this to write several short stories for the Big Finish Short Trips volumes, as well two subsequent audio adventures. Forward also wrote the novella Shell Shock (Telos Publishing Ltd., 2003). This was part of their range of Doctor Who novellas and is now out of print. In the same year, Simon also had another Doctor Who novel published by BBC Books, the Eighth Doctor Adventure Emotional Chemistry (BBC Books, 2003). 2009 saw two novelisations of the BBC television series Merlin, followed by a third in 2010. 2010 also saw the independent publication of an original SF Comedy, Evil UnLtd, in ebook form.

Keith Andrew Topping is an author, journalist and broadcaster most closely associated with his work relating to the BBC Television series Doctor Who and for writing numerous official and unofficial guide books to a wide variety of television and film series, specifically Buffy the Vampire Slayer.He is also the author of two books of rock music critique. To date, Topping has written over 40 books. One of the leading players in British Doctor Who fandom's fan-fiction movement during the 1980s, Topping's first published fiction was the BBC Books "Past Doctor Adventure" The Devil Goblins from Neptune in 1997. The novel was co-written with his friend and frequent collaborator Martin Day. The pair quickly followed this up with the acclaimed novel The Hollow Men in 1998. Following Day's move into TV scripting, Topping wrote the novels The King of Terror (2000) and Byzantium! (2001) solo. The latter novel is the only BBC Books Past Doctor Adventure to be set entirely within one episode of the television series Doctor Who — 1965's The Romans by Dennis Spooner. Topping also wrote the Telos Doctor Who novella Ghost Ship which was published in 2002 and proved so popular that it was one of only two novellas reissued as a paperback edition in 2003. As well as writing fiction, Topping has also authored numerous programme guides to television series as diverse as The X Files, The Avengers, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Sweeney and The Professionals. These were all published by Virgin Books, and co-written with Martin Day and Paul Cornell. Cornell, Day and Topping also collaborated on the popular Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide, published by Virgin Books in 1995 and re-issued, in the US, by MonkeyBrain Books in 2004, a lighthearted guide to the mistakes and incongruities of the television series. The trio had first worked together co-writing two editions of The Guinness Book of Classic British Television (1993 and 1996 respectively). Subsequently, Topping wrote The Complete Slayer: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Every Episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a number of related texts on this popular series as well as guide books to The West Wing (Inside Bartlet's White House), Angel (Hollywood Vampire), 24 (A Day in the Life) and Stargate SG-1 (Beyond the Gate), amongst others. According to the 2003 book Slayer Slang by Michael Adams (Oxford University Press), Topping was the originator of the word 'vampiry' (adj. "exhibiting features of a vampire") in the January 2000 edition of his book Slayer (pg. 26). In addition, Topping is a regular contributor of articles and reviews to several TV and genre titles including TV Zone, Xposé and Shivers and is a former Contributing Editor of Dreamwatch. He also worked as Project Consultant on Charmed: The Complete DVD Collection. On radio, Topping was the Producer/Presenter of the monthly Book Club (2005-2007) and currently co-presents a daily television review slot, Monday to Friday, on The Simon Logan Show for BBC Newcastle. He has also contributed to the BBC television series' I Love the '70s, Call The Cops and The Perfect Detective and has written for Sounds, the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times Culture Supplement and many other magazines and periodicals. Topping writes, and occasionally performs, stand-up comedy and has written radio comedy sketches, an (unproduced) stage play and a TV pilot (with Martin Day) that is, currently, stuck in “Development Hell.” Topping continues to live and work on Tyneside. He achieved a lifetimes ambition in 2005 when his book on The Beatles, Do You Want to Know a Secret was published by Virgin Books.

Since about 2000, book jackets have given his name as just Paul McAuley. A biologist by training, UK science fiction author McAuley writes mostly hard science fiction, dealing with themes such as biotechnology, alternate history/alternate reality, and space travel. McAuley has also used biotechnology and nanotechnology themes in near-future settings. Since 2001, he has produced several SF-based techno-thrillers such as The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, and White Devils. Four Hundred Billion Stars, his first novel, won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988. Fairyland won the 1996 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 1997 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel.