Mary Morrissy was born in Dublin where she still lives. She has published two collections of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993) and Prosperity Drive (2016), and two novels inspired by true events: Mother of Pearl (1995), the story of a stolen infant, and The Pretender (2000), a fictional history of the Polish woman who claimed to be Anastasia, daughter of the last Romanov Tsar. Morrissy has taught in creative writing programmes at the Universities of Arkansas and Iowa in the US as well as in Trinity College, Dublin.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written seven novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Her latest novel, Actress, was published in 2020. Enright has written two collections of short stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather (2009) and a book of non-fiction called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004). 

Lenny Abrahamson is a native of Dublin. He studied philosophy at Trinity, where he co-founded the Trinity Video Company with Ed Guiney, who has gone on to produce all of Abrahamson’s work. This entry into filmmaking led to his first short, 3 Joes, which won a number of awards at European festivals.

Hugo Hamilton was born the child of German-Irish parents in Dublin, Ireland, in 1953. He only attended schools where the teaching took place in his father's language, Gaelic. As the family spoke no English at home – Hamilton spoke German with his mother –, he learnt the language in which he writes today on the streets. Before he began writing short stories and novels, he worked as a journalist and travelled widely throughout Europe.

Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied on the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia taught by Malcolm Bradbury. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1988 and was Writer in the Community for Lisburn and Craigavon under a scheme administered by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Gerry Smyth has been a lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University since 1991. He researches in the areas of Irish cultural history (particularly popular music), modern fiction, post-colonialism, and contemporary critical theory. He has lectured across Europe and the United States, and held fellowships at institutions in Prague, Monaco and Vienna. In 2012 he received Honorary Membership of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania.

Deirdre Madden is one of Ireland’s leading authors. In understated, but resonant, prose she returns again and again to themes of memory, identity, the complexity of family relationships, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the integrity of the artistic life. Her work has won many prizes and has been widely translated into other languages.

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1955 and was educated at University College Dublin where he read History and English. After graduating, he lived and taught in Barcelona, a city that he later wrote about in Homage to Barcelona (1990). He returned to Ireland and worked as a journalist before travelling through South America and Argentina. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E. M.

Claire Kilroy's debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as 'compelling ... a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts', and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed and by 2012's The Devil I Know.

Sarah Clancy is a page and performance poet from Galway. Her most recent collection 'The Truth and Other Stories' and was published by Salmon Poetry in 2014. She has two previous collections to her name, Stacey and the Mechanical Bull (Lapwing Press, Belfast, 2011) and Thanks for Nothing, Hippies. (Salmon Poetry, 2012).