RJ Barker lives in Leeds with his family, a lot of loud music, weird art and a very unpleasant cat. He is the author of the Multi award nominated Wounded Kingdom series, and his newest work is the critically acclaimed The Bone Ships. He is often sleepy.
Stephen Baxter is the author or co-author of over fifty books, from Raft (1991) to World Engines (2019-2020).
Chris Beckett is the author of three short story collections and eight novels (the eighth, Two Tribes, to appear in July). He is the winner of the Edge Hill Prize for his first collection The Turing Test and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Dark Eden. He lives in Cambridge and is a former social worker and lecturer. This story comes from Spring Tide, his most recent collection, and his first published foray into non-SF story telling.
Eric Brown has written eighty SF, crime and children’s books, as well as over 150 short stories. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: eric.meridian1@gmail.com
Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and now lives in Wallasey. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes him as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. His latest novel is The Wise Friend, and PS Publishing have brought out Phantasmagorical Stories in two volumes, a sixty-year retrospective of his short stories.
M.R. Carey is a novelist, comic book writer and screenwriter, best known for DC Vertigo’s Lucifer series and for the novel The Girl With All the Gift. His latest work is the Rampart trilogy, with the first volume The Book of Koli appearing in April 2020.
Simon Clark is the author of many novels and short stories, including Blood Crazy, Vampyrrhic, Darkness Demands, Stranger, Bastion and the award-winning The Night of the Triffids: his adaptation of the novel has been broadcast as a five-part drama serial by BBC radio.
Paul Cornell has written episodes of Elementary, Doctor Who, Primeval, Robin Hood and many other TV series, including his own children’s show, Wavelength. He’s worked for every major comics company, including his creator-owned series Saucer State for IDW and This Damned Band for Dark Horse, and runs for Marvel and DC on Batman and Robin, Wolverine and Young Avengers. He’s the writer of the Lychford rural fantasy novellas from Tor.com Publishing. He’s won the BSFA Award for his short fiction, an Eagle Award for his comics, a Hugo Award for his podcast and shares in a Writer’s Guild Award for his Doctor Who. He’s the co-host of Hammer House of Podcast.
Jaine Fenn is the author of the Hidden Empire space opera series, the Shadowlands duology and numerous short stories. She also writes for video games in the Total War franchise, and for Warhammer Age of Sigmar. “Liberty Bird” won the 2016 BSFA Shorter Fiction Award.
Gary Gibson is from Scotland and refuses to apologise for this. Since 2000 he’s had more than a dozen works of hard sf published and he’s not in the least bit sorry for that either. He has achieved some degree of success and fame primarily by outliving his rivals and secondarily by traveling into the past in an attempt to kill the worst science fiction writer of the 20th Century and thereby inadvertently triggering the rise of Hitler.
Lesley Glaister is a novelist, poet and short-story writer. She lives in Edinburgh – with frequent forays to Orkney – and teaches Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood writes genre fic as JCG, crime fic as Jack G and lit fic as Jonathan G. He’s won the BSFA Best Novel Award twice and been shortlisted for everything from the Clarke Award to Le Prix Montesquieu. Kingdom of Silence is now available as an ebook. Nightfall Berlin, from Penguin, is an Amazon best seller.
Peter F. Hamilton has been writing Space Opera novels for twenty-seven years now, so he reckons he’s only got another six years to go and he’ll have got away with not having a proper job for most of his adult life.
Frances Hardinge writes dark, bizarre genre fiction for children and young adults. She is physically inseparable from her Fedora, and is addicted to volcanoes. She has won a number of awards for her work including the Costa Book of the Year, the LA Times Book Award (YA category), the Branford Boase Award, and the Robert Holdstock Award.
Cat Hellisen is a writer of fantasy novels and speculative short stories. Her work has appeared in several magazines and anthologies. She's a figure skater and an artist, with interests in folk lore, nudibranchs, and long, rambling walks. You can connect with Cat on at www.cathellisen.com or on Twitter @cat_hellisen
Kim Lakin-Smith is a Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy writer whose dystopian dust punk novel, Cyber Circus was shortlisted for both the British Science Fiction and British Fantasy Society Best Novel Award. Her latest novel, Rise, is set in a far future concentration camp and explores notions of otherness, prejudice, and redemption.
Mark Lawrence is a fantasy writer living in the UK. Author of the Broken Empire, Red Queen’s War, Book of the Ancestor, Impossible Times, and Book of the Ice trilogies. He has a stupid dog.
Tim Lebbon is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had over forty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is the eco-horror novel Eden. The movie of The Silence debuted on Netflix April 2019, and Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released Hallowe’en 2015. Find out more about Tim at his website www.timlebbon.net
Alison Littlewood is the author of Mistletoe, A Cold Season and The Hidden People, among other novels. She has won the Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.
Ian McDonald is an SFF writer from Northern Ireland. He lives just outside Belfast. His first novel, in 1988, was Desolation Road, a Locus award winner and soon be to be immortalized as a Gollancz masterwork. His most recent novel is Luna: Moon Rising, the final part of the Luna trilogy. The entire trilogy has been nominated for a Hugo for Best Series : 2020. Work in Progress is Hopeland, a novel of love, time, volcanoes and Tesla coils, in the Early Anthropocene.
Juliet E McKenna writes epic and contemporary fantasy novels while her shorter fiction takes excursions into darker fantasy, steampunk, some SF and a few media tie-in stories.
Ian R MacLeod is the author of seven novels and numerous short stories and novellas. His work has won many awards, including the Arthur C Clarke and World Fantasy Awards, and been translated into many languages. He maintains a website at ianrmacleod.com and lives in the riverside town of Bewdley.
Ken MacLeod is the author of seventeen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to The Corporation Wars (2018), and many articles and short stories. His most recent book is the novella Selkie Summer (NewCon Press, 2020).
Tim Major’s novels include Hope Island and Snakeskins, and his other books include a collection of short stories, And the House Lights Dim, and a non-fiction book about the silent crime film, Les Vampires. His stories have appeared in Interzone, Best of British Science Fiction and Best Horror of the Year. www.cosycatastrophes.com
George Mann is the Sunday Times Bestselling writer of the Newbury & Hobbes, Tales of the Ghost and Wychwood novels. He’s written for brands including Star Wars, Doctor Who, Warhammer, Sherlock Holmes and more, and is currently part of the writers’ room for a forthcoming genre television show.
Mark Morris is a multi-award winning author and editor. In his 30-year career he has written or edited around fifty novels, novellas, short story collections, anthologies and audio dramas.
Blake Morrison has written poetry, memoirs and fiction. His latest book is a novel, The Executor. He is professor of creative and life writing at Goldsmiths University.
Anne Nicholls, formerly Anne Gay, is the author of four adult SF novels, four YA novels, two self-help books and Music from the Fifth Planet, a collection of short stories. She was the editor of the Science Fiction Zone for LineOne/Tiscali and an agony aunt for them and the Department of Children, Schools and Families. She is married to author Stan Nicholls.
Stan Nicholls, a full-time writer since 1980, has over thirty books to his credit, mostly in the science fiction and fantasy genres. His journalism, in numerous print publications and online, approximates two million words. He hopes he’ll get the hang of this writing malarkey one day. www.stannicholls.com
Reggie Oliver is an actor, director, biographer, illustrator and award winning author of fiction both short and long. He has had published well over a hundred short stories and is currently writing more while self-isolating in Suffolk.
Philip Palmer is a novelist, screenwriter, and radio dramatist, and also teaches at Goldsmiths University in South London. He has written five science fiction novels for Orbit Books including Debatable Space and Version 43 and his other books include Hell on Earth and the novella Morpho for NewCon Press. His feature film The Ballad of Billy McCrae is currently in post-production.
Tim Pears has written eleven novels (most recently The West Country Trilogy) and essays on sport, and has a collection of short stories published by Bloomsbury in 2021
Christopher Priest is a novelist, whose works include The Prestige, Inverted World and The Affirmation. His most recent novel is The Evidence, published in 2020. He lives in west Scotland, on the Isle of Bute.
Adam Roberts is a writer and an academic, and in that latter capacity has to read a lot of academic papers and essays, which he considers to be a genre all of their own. Why not write science fiction in the form of a mock academic paper? In addition to its requisite SF novum, the story includes (as these sorts of academic papers often do) an implicit narrative, although for the author the best bits are the footnotes and bibliography. Since this is a story about the future of disease, Adam thought it the right one for this anthology
Michèle Roberts writes novels, poems and short stories. She is half-French and loves French wine.
Jane Rogers is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and radio dramatist. Her most recent publication is the dystopian novel Body Tourists. www.janerogers.info
Priya Sharma is a GP in the UK. She has won British Fantasy Awards and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her collection “All the Fabulous Beasts” is available from Undertow Publications and her novella Ormeshadow from Tor. Her website is www.priyasharmafiction.wordpress.com
Robert Shearman once wrote a story for Doctor Who about a Dalek getting chained up and emotional, and is trying to live that down. “44: Digits” is taken from his latest book, We All Hear Stories in the Dark, a labyrinth of 101 weird tales, from PS Publications.
Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of over twenty novels and novellas including Children of Time, Guns of the Dawn, Dogs of War and the Shadows of the Apt series, and is the winner of the Arthur C Clarke and British Fantasy Awards.
Natalia Theodoridou is a World Fantasy Award-winning author of short fiction and a Nebula-nominated game writer, one of the editors of sub-Q interactive fiction magazine, and a Clarion West graduate. To find out more, visit www.natalia-theodoridou.com, or follow on Twitter
@natalia_theodor.
Tade Thompson lives and works in the UK. He won the 2019 Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel Rosewater, a part of the Hugo-nominated Wormwood Trilogy. His other works include Making Wolf and The Murders of Molly Southbourne. Among other things, he works for the NHS.
Lavie Tidhar’s most recent novels are Unholy Land (2018), Candy (2018) and By Force Alone (2020).
Lisa Tuttle is an award-winning author of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Her novels include Windhaven (written with George R.R. Martin) and The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief (2016) and most recently The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross.
Ren Warom is a writer of the weird and the speculative, variously published by Titan books, Apex Publications, NewCon Press, and Fox Spirit books.
Ian Watson (1943) has screen credit for the screen story of Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) based on a year spent eyeball to eyeball with Stanley Kubrick. Decades earlier, Watson actually went to Balliol College, Oxford, location of this loving 2003 homage to TV's Inspector Morse investigating a murdered alien.
Mark West is Northamptonshire born and bred and has been writing fiction since he was 8. Published in the small press since 1999, he has a couple of novels, a handful of novellas (some even nominated for awards!) and over 90 short stories to his name. He can be found online at www.markwest.org.uk
Ian Whates is the author of eight published novels (most recently Dark Angels Rising, 2020), plus two co-written, as well as more than seventy short stories. He has also edited some thirty-odd anthologies. His work has been shortlisted for several awards and even won a few here and there. In 2006 he started NewCon Press by accident and continues to be baffled by its success.
Aliya Whiteley has written over one hundred published short stories that have appeared in Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, Strange Horizons, The Dark, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction. She also writes a regular non-fiction column for Interzone magazine. Her novels and novellas have been shortlisted for multiple awards. Her latest SF novel Greensmith, and a collection of her short fiction, will be published in 2020.
Neil Williamson is a Scottish writer whose books, including The Moon King, The Ephemera and Secret Language, have been shortlisted for the BSFA, British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards. His next book, The Packet, will be published in 2020.
Nick Wood is a South African-British SF writer who owes much to the NHS, for their management of his Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. “A Million Reasons Why” is from his Luna Press (2019) collection Learning Monkey and Crocodile. His latest novel is Water Must Fall (2020) newly launched by NewCon Press.