Paul Kearney was born in rural County Antrim, Ireland, in 1967. His father was a butcher, and his mother was a nurse. He rode horses, had lots of cousins, and cut turf and baled hay. He often smelled of cowshit. He grew up through the worst of the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland, a time when bombs and gunfire were part of every healthy young boy's adolescence. He developed an unhealthy interest in firearms and Blowing Things Up - but what growing boy hasn't? By some fluke of fate he managed to get to Oxford University, and studied Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. He began writing books because he had no other choice. His first, written at aged sixteen, was a magnificent epic, influenced heavily by James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Robert E Howard, and Playboy. It was enormous, colourful, purple-prosed, and featured a lot of Very Large Swords. His second was rather better, and was published by Victor Gollancz over a very boozy lunch with a very shrewd editor. Luckily, in those days editors met authors face to face, and Kearney's Irish charm wangled him a long series of contracts with Gollancz, and other publishers. He still thinks he can't write for toffee, but others have, insanely, begged to differ. Kearney has been writing full-time for twenty-eight years now, and can't imagine doing anything else. Though he has often tried.

Lora Gray is a writer and artist from Northeast Ohio. Their fiction and poetry can be found in Shimmer, Strange Horizons, and The Dark, among other places. Lora is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a graduate of Clarion West, a recipient of the Ohio Arts Council's Individual Excellence Award for Fiction Writing, and a Rhysling Award nominated poet. As an illustrator, Lora has provided cover and interior art for various novels, anthologies, and comic books and has been a featured instructor for the Cleveland Museum of Art's MIX series. Lora also works as dance instructor and occasionally moonlights as a musician. In their free time, Lora can be found wrangling a very smart cat named Cecil.