Nicola Barker was named as one of the 20 Best Young British Novelists by Granta in 2005, and her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories. Her other works include Five Miles from Outer Hope, Behindlings, Clear: A Transparent Novel, and Heading Inland, which received the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her novel Wide Open won the IMPAC Prize in 2000, while Clear was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. Darkmans was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes in 2007, and won the Hawthornden Prize. Her most recent novel, The Yips, was published last year and long-listed for the Man Booker prize.

Jonathan Derbyshire is culture editor of the New Statesman. He has been at the New Statesman since April 2009. Before that, he worked as a freelance literary journalist. His essays and reviews have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the New York Sun, Prospect and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the editor of Time Out: 1,000 Books to Change Your Life (2007) and co-editor, with Jessica Cargill Thompson, of London Calling: High Art and Low Life in the Capital Since 1968 (2008). In a previous life, Jonathan was an academic and taught in several English universities. He is currently writing a book about the welfare state.

Gabriel Josipovici is a novelist, playwright, and critic whose work has been translated into the major European languages and into Arabic. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the author of 18 novels, including Goldberg: Variations (2001) and Everything Passes (2006), and has also written three volumes of stories, eight critical books, and a memoir of his mother, the poet and translator Sacha Rabinovitch. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France and Germany, and he is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. His most recent work of criticism, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, was published in 2010 and his last novel, Infinity: The Story of a Moment, appeared in May 2012.

Tim Parnell is Senior Lecturer in English and Head of the Department of English & Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths. His publications include Constructing Christopher Marlowe (co-edited with J. A. Downie) and critical editions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. He has written widely on Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, aspects of eighteenth-century culture and the broader traditions of the novel. He is a contributing editor of The Scriblerian and is currently completing Laurence Sterne: A Literary Life. His teaching focuses on the eighteenth century and the history of the novel from Rabelais and Cervantes to the present day.