Gina Apostol’s last novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter (W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy (University of the Philippines Press) and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (Anvil Publishing, Inc.), both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She is working on William McKinley’s World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She was Writer in Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.
Kevin Barry is the author of Beatlebone (Canongate, 2015), City of Bohane (Jonathan Cape, 2011), and the story collections Dark Lies the Island (Jonathan Cape, 2012) and There Are Little Kingdoms (Stinging Fly Press, 2007). His awards include the IMPAC Dublin City Literary Award, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, the Stinging Fly, and many other journals. He also writes screenplays, stage plays and radio plays. He lives in County Sligo.
Sara Baume studied Fine Art at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design before completing a Master’s in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. Her short fiction has been published in journals and newspapers. In 2014 she won the Davy Byrnes Award and was named Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year at the 44th annual awards in Dublin. Her debut novel Spill Simmer Falter Wither (Tramp Press, 2015) has been long-listed for the 2015 Warwick Prize for Writing, and will be published by William Heinemann in the UK and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the USA in 2016. It is also due to be translated into Spanish, Dutch, French and German. She lives in Cork with her two dogs.
Mark Doten’s first novel, The Infernal, was published in 2015 by Graywolf Press. He wrote the libretto for The Source, an opera about Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks that premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014 and appeared on the New York Times list of best classical vocal performances of the year. He is senior editor at Soho Press, and co-host with author Adam Wilson of the literary podcast The Consolation Prize. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is a recipient of fellowships from Columbia and The MacDowell Colony. He can be found at markdoten.com.
Niven Govinden is the author of four novels, We Are the New Romantics (Bloomsbury, 2004), Graffiti My Soul (Canongate, 2007), Black Bread White Beer (HarperCollins, 2013) most recently All the Days and Nights (The Friday Project, 2014), which was longlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize. He has been twice-shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize, and was a winner of the Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2013.
David Hayden’s short stories have appeared in The Dublin Review, The Warwick Review, gorse, The Moth, the Stinging Fly, Numéro Cinq, Lighthouse and Spolia, and poetry in PN Review. He was shortlisted for the 25th RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story prize.
Porochista Khakpour is a novelist, essayist, journalist, and professor. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir SICK (HarperPerennial, 2017), and the novels The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) – a 2014 ‘Best Book of the Year’ according to NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature, and more – and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove, 2007) – the 2007 California Book Award winner in ‘First Fiction,’ one of the Chicago Tribune’s ‘Fall’s Best,’ and a New York Times ‘Editor’s Choice.’ She has had fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, Ucross, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Northwestern University, the University of Leipzig, and many others. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Slate, Salon, Spin, the Daily Beast, Elle, and many other publications around the world. She is currently Contributing Editor at The Offing, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Writer in Residence at Bard College. Born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles, she lives in New York City.
Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and three novels: The Ask, a New York Times Notable Book, The Subject Steve and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the first annual Believer Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
Belinda McKeon is the author of Solace (Picador, 2011), which won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Sunday Independent Best Newcomer Award at the Irish Book Awards and was also voted Irish Book of the Year 2011, and Tender (Picador, 2015). McKeon’s essays and non-fiction have been published in The New York Times, the Guardian, the Paris Review and the Irish Times, as well as in a number of anthologies. As a playwright, she has had work produced in Dublin and New York. She lives in Brooklyn and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University.
Francesca Marciano is the author of three novels, Rules of the Wild, a New York Times Notable Book, Casa Rossa, The End of Manners, and The Other Language, a collection of short stories which was shortlisted for the Story Prize in 2014. She was Writer in Residence at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos and at the M Literary Residency in Sangam House in India. She has written several film scripts, mostly for the Italian cinema. She uses both Italian and English in her writing, although English is the language she uses when writing fiction. She has lived in the US and Kenya and now lives in Rome.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin in 1954. She has written novels, collections of short stories, several books for children, plays and non-fiction works. She writes in both Irish and English. Her short story collections include Blood and Water, Eating Women is Not Recommended, Midwife to the Fairies, The Inland Ice, The Pale Gold of Alaska and The Shelter of Neighbours. Among her literary awards are The Bisto Book of the Year Award, the Readers’ Association of Ireland Award, the Stewart Parker Award for Drama, the Butler Award for Prose from the Irish American Cultural Institute and several Oireachtas awards for novels and plays in Irish. She received the Irish Pen Award for an Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature in 2015. The novel The Dancers Dancing (Blackstaff Press, 2000) was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her stories are widely anthologised and translated. Her next novel for young people, Aisling, will be published in autumn 2015. Éilís worked for many years as an assistant keeper in the National Library of Ireland. She is now Writer Fellow in UCD (University College, Dublin) where she teaches on the MA in Creative Writing. She is a member of Aosdána.
Yoko Ogawa has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Diving Pool, Hotel Iris, Revenge and The Housekeeper and the Professor, which was adapted into a film, The Professor’s Beloved Equation. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. She has won every major Japanese literary award.
Kristín Ómarsdóttir is the author of four novels, three short story collections, seven books of poetry, and seven staged plays. Her work has been published in Swedish and French. Ómarsdóttir has been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize and the Nordic Council’s Drama Prize. She has also received the DV Cultural Award for Literature, and the ‘Griman,’ the Icelandic prize for best playwright of the year. She lives in Reykjavik and is currently at work on her new novel.
E.C. Osondu was born in Nigeria, where he worked for many years as an advertising copywriter. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2009. He is the author of the book of short stories Voice of America (HarperPerennial, 2011) and the novel This House Is Not for Sale (Harper, 2015). His short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Guernica, AGNI, and many other magazines. With William Pierce, he coedited The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction. His AGNI story ‘A Letter from Home’ was named one of the Top Ten Online Stories of 2006 by storySouth, and his AGNI story ‘Jimmy Carter’s Eyes’ was a finalist for the Caine Prize. He was interviewed in the World Books podcast for Public Radio International’s The World. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where he was a Syracuse University Fellow. He is Associate Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. His writing has been translated into German, Italian, French, German, and Belarussian.
Elske Rahill grew up in Dublin and was educated at Trinity College. Her short stories have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. Her first novel, Between Dog and Wolf (2013) is published by the Lilliput Press and a collection of her short stories is scheduled for publication this year. She lives in Burgundy with her partner and their three sons. She would like to thank Dr Joseph Roche for his generous assistance with her research for ‘Terraforming’.
Ross Raisin’s second novel, Waterline, was published in July 2011 (Viking, Penguin). His first novel, God’s Own Country (Viking, Penguin), came out in the UK in 2008. The book won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2009, the Guildford First Novel Prize, a Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for six others, including the Guardian First Book Award and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2013 he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. He has written short stories for Prospect, Granta, Esquire, Dazed & Confused, the Sunday Times, and BBC Radio Three and Four, and done journalistic feature work, mainly for the Guardian.
Suzanne Scanlon is the author of two novels, Promising Young Women (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2012) and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi Press, 2015). She lives in Chicago, where she writes about theater for Time Out and the Chicago Reader. She teaches Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, Roosevelt University and in the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival.
Maria Takolander is the author of a book of short stories, The Double (Text 2013); three collections of poetry, The End of the World (Giramondo, 2014), Ghostly Subjects (Salt, 2009) and Narcissism (Whitmore Press, 2005); and a work of literary criticism, Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (Peter Lang, 2007). She is currently writing a novel, Transit, for Text Publishing. She is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.