The Stone Sky

Alexis Wright is one of Australia's finest writers and a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the outback town of Tennant Creek, and the novel Plains of Promise, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year and the NSW Premier's Award. In 2007 Carpentaria won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's equivalent of the Booker.

Amanda Coe is the acclaimed screenwriter and author who in 2013 won a BAFTA for the BBC Four adaptation of John Braine's Room at the Top, starring Maxine Peake. Her other credits include Life in Squares, Margot, As If and the recent BBC One adaptation of Apple Tree Yard. Her novels What They Do in the Dark and Getting Colder are published by Virago.

Justin Hill was born in the Bahamas, and grew up in York, attending St Peter's School. He studied Old England and Medieval Literature at Durham University, and spent most of his twenties on postings with Voluntary Service Overseas in rural China and East Africa.He has written poetry, non-fiction and fiction, which spans eras as distant from one another as Anglo Saxon England, in Shieldwall, to Tang Dynasty, China, in Passing Under Heaven. His work has won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award, as well as being selected as a Sunday Times Book of the Year (Shieldwall) and a Washington Post Books of the Year (The Drink and Dream Teahouse). In 2014 he was selected to write the sequel to the Oscar winning film, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. He lives near York.

Karen Miller was born in Vancouver, Canada, and came to Australia when she was two. Apart from a two year stint in the UK after graduating she's lived around Sydney ever since. She has held a variety of interesting jobs and fell in love with speculative fiction at primary school.

With an ancestry stretching back to the Mayflower, Lara Adrian lives with her husband in coastal New England, surrounded by centuries-old graveyards, hip urban comforts and the endless inspiration of the dark Atlantic ocean.