CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOS

NAOMI ALDERMAN is the bestselling author of The Future and The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, was chosen as a book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. The Power was recently adapted as a series for Amazon Prime. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is co-creator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She lives in London.

ELIF BATUMAN’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for the Women’s Prize. The sequel, Either/Or, was published in 2022. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010.

JOSHUA COHEN’s books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His most recent novel, The Netanyahus, won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in New York City.

CHARLIE KAUFMAN is the writer of a story in this collection.

YIYUN LI is the author of eleven books, including Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award; Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Windham-Campbell Prize, PEN/Malamud Award, and PEN/Hemingway Award. She teaches at Princeton University.

TOMMY ORANGE is the New York Times bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2018 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. There There was long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2019. It was deemed a Top Five Fiction Book of the Year by the New York Times and won the John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.

HELEN OYEYEMI’s books include What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Parasol Against the Axe. She’s a recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award and PEN’s Open Book Award, and her novel Peaces was short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize.

KEITH RIDGWAY is from Dublin. He is the author of A Shock, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Hawthorn & Child; and Animals. He has been awarded the Prix Femina Étranger in France and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He lives in south London.

LEONE ROSS is a novelist, short story writer, editor, and educator. Her third novel, This One Sky Day, was nominated for the Women’s Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize, among other honors—and named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized and her first short-story collection, Come Let Us Sing Anyway, prompted the Times Literary Supplement to call her “a pointilliste, a master of detail.” In 2021, she won the Manchester Prize for Fiction for a single short story. Ross has taught creative writing for twenty-five years, and worked as a journalist throughout the 1990s. She is the editor of Glimpse: A Black British Anthology of Speculative Fiction, published in 2022.

BECCA ROTHFELD is an essayist, critic, editor, and philosopher, and the author of All Things Are Too Small. She has written for publications such as the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times Book Review, and she is currently the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post and an editor at The Point. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and her dog, Kafka.

ALI SMITH was born in Inverness and lives in Cambridge. Her fiction has been translated into more than forty languages.