Former ghost-writer, Nicola Pierce has written four novels of historical fiction for children and is currently working on her fifth. Her first novel, Spirit of the Titanic, published by The O'Brien Press in 2011, was reprinted five times within its first twelve months. Her second novel, City of Fate, about World War II's Battle of Stalingrad, was shortlisted for the Warwickshire Year Nine Book Award 2014. In 2015, The O'Brien Press published Behind the Walls, about the 1688-9 Siege of Derry.

Billy O'Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of three novels: The Dead House, (Brandon/O'Brien Press, 2017), My Coney Island Baby (Jonathan Cape/Harper Collins, 2019), Life Sentences (Jonathan Cape, 2021) and four short story collections: In Exile (Mercier Press, 2008), In Too Deep (Mercier Press, 2009) The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (New Island Books, 2013) and The Boatman and Other Stories (Harper Collins, 2020)

Heather Richardson was born in Northern Ireland in 1964. She studied English Literature at the University of Leicester, and over the next few years worked in a variety of non-literary jobs, including stints as a bus driver, pharmaceutical sales representative and company director. She later studied part-time to gain an MA (Lancaster University) and PhD (Open University) in Creative Writing.

Nessa O'Mahony was born in Dublin, Ireland. She has published five books of poetry -- Bar Talk, appeared (1999), Trapping a Ghost (2005), In Sight of Home (2009), Her Father’s Daughter (2014) and The Hollow Woman on the island (2019). Arlen House published her debut work of crime fiction, The Branchman, in 2018. She completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Bangor University in 2006.

Mia Gallagher is the critically acclaimed author of two novels: HellFire (Penguin, 2006), awarded the Irish Tatler Literature Award 2007, and Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland (New Island, 2016), longlisted for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Award. Her debut short-story collection, Shift (New Island, 2018) includes ‘Polyfilla’, recently shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Book Awards.

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.