Tahmima was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is the author of The Good Muslim and A Golden Age, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in Dhaka and London and is a Contributing Opinion Writer for the New York Times. Her new novel, The Bones of Grace, is published in May 2016.
Adam is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University.
A Whiting Writers Award winner, his work has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, GQ, The New York Times and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two short story collections – Emporium, and Fortune Smiles, which won the 2015 National Book Award – and two novels - Parasites Like Us, and The Orphan Master’s Son, which received the 2013 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-nine languages. Johnson was a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.
Anna was born in Westphalia in 1987. In 2012, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Since then, her work has been published in Lighthouse, Elbow Room and Tender Journal. She lives in Norwich. Her first collection of stories, Blind Water Pass, is being published in May 2016.
Marjorie is the author of the novel Y, which was a Waterstones’ 11 debut pick and finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was born on Vancouver Island, she now lives in the United States.
Elizabeth is the author of five books of fiction, most recently the novel My Name Is Lucy Barton. She won the Pultizer Prize in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, which was made into an HBO series, and Amy and Isabelle was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her work has been published in a number of different countries; Italy awarded her the Premio Bancarella Award in June 2010. Elizabeth originally trained as a lawyer, graduating from Syracuse University College of Law with a JD and a Certificate of Gerontology in 1982. She then moved to New York where she taught for many years at Manhattan Community College while writing. She has one daughter, and now divides her time between New York and Maine.
Jonathan wrote The Beijing of Possibilities, which was longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Award. His story The Human Phonograph was the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Jonathan is a poet, librettist, and quantum physicist. He has lived in Beijing, Tokyo, Jerusalem, London, Berlin, San Francisco, and New York.