Marion Coutts is an artist and writer. She was born in Nigeria and studied in Scotland. She works in video, film, sculpture and photography. Her work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and The Wellcome Collection, London. She has held fellowships at Tate Liverpool and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. In 2001 she married the art critic Tom Lubbock. After his death in 2011, she wrote the introduction to his memoir Until Further Notice, I am Alive and is the editor of English Graphic, an anthology of his essays. Her book The Iceberg was published in 2014. She is a Lecturer in Art at Goldsmiths College and lives in London.

Clare Clark was born in London in 1967. A Senior Scholar at Trinity College Cambridge she graduated with a Double First in History. Novels published by Penguin include The Great Stink, The Nature of Monsters, Savage Lands and Beautiful Lies. Her most recent book is a novel about love and loss, We That Are Left , which explores the devastating effect of the First World War and the choices a family must make when all the conditions and convictions upon which they have constructed their lives have been shattered. She is married with two children and lives in London.

John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has written four novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, and Capital, and three works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, about the global financial crisis and How to Speak Money which lays out the case for financial literacy. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, E.M Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. He is married, has two children and lives in London.