Emer Martin's first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won the 1996 Book of the Year in her native Ireland at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week. The next year,  Houghton Mifflin released the book in the US. More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel, was published internationally in 1999. Her third novel, Baby Zero, was published in the UK and Ireland in March 2007, and released in the US in 2014. The Cruelty Men is her latest novel, published in June 2018 and nominated for Irish Novel of the Year in 2019. 

Barry McCrea is the author of a novel The First Verse, winner of the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction, and two works of non-fiction: In the Company of Strangers, a study of rival networks to the family in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust, and Languages of the Night, about the effect that dying languages and dialects had on the European literary imagination in the twentieth century. He is a professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame, where he has been teaching in its campuses in Rome and Indiana.

Molly McCloskey grew up in the US but spent 25 years living in Ireland, where parts of her 2017 novel When Light is Like Water (Penguin) are set. The novel was published in the US by Scribner as Straying. Molly is also the author of two short story collections, a novel, and a memoir, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother. She has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award, the world’s largest prize for a single short story, and for the Irish Book Awards.

Bernie McGill is the author of Sleepwalkers, a collection of stories short-listed in 2014 for the Edge Hill short story prize, and of the novels The Butterfly Cabinet and The Watch House. This Train is For, her second short story collection, is set to be published in June 2022. She has been published in the UK, the US and in translation in Italy (La donna che collezionava farfalle; Le parole nell’aria) and in the Netherlands (Charlottes vleugels). Her short fiction has appeared in acclaimed an

Sam Blake is a pseudonym for Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin, the founder of The Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the national writing resources website Writing.ie. She is Ireland's leading literary scout who has assisted many award winning and bestselling authors to publication. Vanessa is Chair of Irish PEN and founder of the Murder One international crime writing festival. She has been writing fiction since her husband set sail across the Atlantic for eight weeks and she had an idea for a book. 

Gerard Donovan was born in Wexford, Ireland, and grew up in Galway. He graduated from NUI and the John Hopkins Writing Seminars. His debut novel Schopenhauer's Telescope (2003) was long-listed for the Man Booker prize, his third novel, Julius Winsome, currently available in over a dozen languages, is soon to be a major motion picture. His next publication was a collection of short stories set in Ireland, followed by a novel set in early twentieth-century Europe which he is currently writing.

Catherine Dunne is the author of ten published novels including The Things We Know Now, which won the 700th anniversary Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Eason Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. She has also published one work of non-fiction: a social history of Irish immigrants in London in the nineteen-fifties, called An Unconsidered People. Catherine’s novels have been short-listed for, among others, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Italian Booksellers’

Evelyn Conlon is a novelist and short story writer who has been described as one of Ireland’s major truly creative writers. Observant and suffused with wit, her work has been widely anthologized and translated, including into Tamil; her selected short stories Telling is now available in Chinese. She is editor of four anthologies, including Cutting the Night in Two, and Later On, which became a centerpiece for a series of lectures titled The Language of War at the University of Bologna.

Alan McMonagle is a writer based in Galway, Ireland. In November 2015 he signed a two-book deal with Picador. His debut novel, Ithaca, was published in March 2017, and was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Award for first novels and an Irish Book Award. He has received awards for his work from the Professional Artists’ Retreat in Yaddo (New York), the Fundación Valparaiso (Spain), the Banff Centre for Creativity (Canada) and the Arts Council of Ireland.

Lia Mills writes novels, short fiction, memoir and essays.  Her first novel, Another Alice, was nominated for the Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize. Nothing Simple was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year at the inaugural Irish Book Awards. Her memoir of an experience of oral cancer, In Your Face, was named as a favourite book of the year (2007) by several commentators. Her most recent novel, Fallen, was the Dublin/Belfast Two Cities One Book festival selection for 2016.