Shilpa Agarwal was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) and currently lives in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Duke University and UCLA and has taught at both UCLA and UC Santa Barbara.

Helen Benedict, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, has written frequently on women, race, and justice. Her books include Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, and the novels The Opposite of Love, The Sailor's Wife, Bad Angel, and A World Like This. Her work on soldiers won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Mark Billingham is the author of the critically acclaimed Tom Thorne crime series. A standup comic, he began working in the alternative comedy circuit in the United Kingdom in 1987. Since then he has appeared on more than thirty radio and television shows. The Sunday Times rates him as "one of the very best." He now writes for the BBC and ITV, where he has twice been nominated for Royal Television Society Awards. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

Born Oscar Robert Blechman in 1930, R. O. Blechman's internationally acclaimed artwork spans decades, mediums and industries. He is one of the first contemporary cartoonists to pen a full-length graphic novel with The Juggler of Our Lady in 1953, which he published after graduating from Oberlin College. His illustrations and comics have graced magazines, anthologies and newspapers. He has created over a dozen New Yorker covers. He is also in the Art Directors Hall of Fame, has been an Adweek Illustrator of the Year, and is the creator of many notable advertising campaigns. Blechman is married, has two sons, and lives in Ancram, New York.

Joan Brady was the first woman and the only American to win the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Award, with her novel Theory of War. Her most recent novel, Bleedout, earned her international acclaim and comparisons to John leCarre and John Grisham.

Nic Brown is an English professor at the University of Northern Colorado. Floodmarkers, his first book, was published in 2009 and was selected as an Editor's Choice by The New York Times Book Review. His first novel, Doubles, was published in 2010. His short stories have appeared in a variety of magazines including the Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, and Epoch. He received his MFA from Iowa.

Hester Browne was born in England's Lake District, studied English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and lives in London. A former fiction editor, she made her own fiction debut with the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Little Lady Agency. She is also the author of Little Lady, Big Apple, The Little Lady and the Prince, and now The Finishing Touches.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi grew up in central Connecticut.  Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including The New England Review, Ninth Letter, and The Paris Review (from which she received the Bernard F. Connors Prize for the long poem).  A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, she has been both a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.  She lives in Berkeley, California.

Carol Wiley Cassella practices anesthesiology in Seattle and is a freelance medical writer specializing in global health advocacy for the developing world.  She is a former student of David Guterson and graduated with a degree in English Literature from Duke University.  She is the mother of two sets of twins.

Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of eleven previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She writes a weekly column for Newsday and teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family.

Michelle Cooper is a speech pathologist and writes novels for teenagers. She is the award-winning author of A Brief History of Montmaray, The FitzOsbornes in Exile and The Rage of Sheep.

Sallie Day grew up in England, where her father ran a cotton mill (so she knows her "weft from her warp"). The Palace of Strange Girls is her first book.

Ruth Downie's bestselling series of novels featuring the Roman Army doctor Gaius Petreus Ruso started with Medicus and continues with Terra Incognita: A Novel of the Roman Empire (Bloomsbury, March 2008) and Persona Non Grata (Bloomsbury, July 2009).

As well as The Anniversary Man, R.J. Ellory is the author of the internationally bestselling A Quiet Belief in Angels, which was The Strand Magazine's Thriller of the Year in 2009, and was a finalist for the SIBA Award.

Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, but lived in various places in Malaysia as a child. He studied law at the University of London and later worked as an advocate and solicitor in one of Kuala Lumpur's most reputable law firms. He also has a first-dan ranking in aikido and is a strong proponent for the conservation of heritage buildings. He has spent the last year traveling around South Africa, and is currently living in Malaysia. The Gift of Rain is his first novel.

Harriet Evans is the author of The Love of Her Life, and the international bestseller Going Home, available from Downtown Press. She lives in London, where she works in publishing.

Nigel Farndale is the author of The Blasphemer which the (London) Times called "a fine novel; strange and unforgettable." His previous work includes Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce (a biography shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and Flirtation, Seduction, Betrayal (a collection of his award-winning Sunday Telegraph interviews). He read philosophy as a postgraduate at Durham University, worked as a farmer in the Yorkshire Dales for a few years and now lives on the Hampshire-Sussex border with his wife and their three children.

John Flanagan grew up in Sydney, Australia, hoping to be a writer. After writing advertising copy for twenty years, John teamed with an old friend to develop a television sitcom, Hey Dad!, which aired for eight years. John began writing Ranger's Apprentice for his son, Michael, ten years ago, and is still hard at work on the series. He currently lives in the suburb of Manly, Australia, with his wife.

Karen Foxlee won the 2008 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book for Southeast Asia and South Pacific region and the 2006 Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Emerging Author. She lives in Gympie in Northern Australia.

Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand's finest writers. He has written more than forty books for adults and young adults and has won several literary awards, including the Wattie Award, the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the New Zealand Fiction Award and the New Zealand Children's Book of the Year Award. His fifth novel Plumb, published in 1978, won the UK's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Maurice Gee's young adult novels include The Fat Man, Orchard Street, Hostel Girl, Under the Mountain, The O Trilogy and The Salt Trilogy. Maurice lives in Nelson, in New Zealand's South Island.

Grant Ginder graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he edited 34^th Street, the school's humor and culture magazine.  He currently works as a speechwriting associate at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.  He lives in New York City.

Robert Goddard is the author of several acclaimed mystery thrillers, including Name to a Face (Bantam, June 2009), Borrowed Time, Hand in Glove, In Pale Battalions, Into the Blue, Never Go Back, Play to the End, Sight Unseen and Beyond Recall.

Lawrence Goldstone is the author of the thriller The Anatomy of Deception and several works of history, including Dark Bargain, The Activist, and with his wife, Nancy Goldstone, Out of the Flames. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.

Charlotte Greig worked as a music journalist in print and radio before becoming a folk singer and songwriter. She has made five albums and written a book on girl groups, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?: Girl Groups from the 50s On. She is also a playwright, for radio and stage. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, U.K., with her family. A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy is her first novel.

James W. Hall is an Edgar and Shamus Award-winning author whose books have been translated into a dozen languages. He has written four books of poetry, a collection of short fiction, and a collection of essays. His most recent novel is Silencer (St. Martin's Press, September 2009). He divides his time between South Florida and North Carolina.

Robert Harris is the author of The Ghost, Imperium, Pompeii, Archangel, Enigma, Fatherland, and Selling Hitler. He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for the London Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and have been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children.

John Harvey is the author of the Charlie Resnick novels and the Frank Elder series, and a recipient of the Silver Dagger Award, the Barry Award, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement, among other honors. He lives in London.

Richard Hawke is the author of Speak of the Devil. He lives in New York City.

Elin Hilderbrand is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a teaching/writing fellow. She lives with her husband and their three children in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Matt Hilton is the author of two thrillers featuring Joe Hunter, Dead Man's Dust and Judgement and Wrath, which have been compared to the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child. An expert in kempo jujitsu, he holds the rank of fourth dan. He founded and taught at the respected Bushidokan Dojo, and has worked in private security and for the police department in Cumbria, England.

Beth Hoffman was the president and co-owner of a major interior design studio in Cincinnati, OH, before turning to writing full-time. She lives with her husband and two cats in a quaint historic district in Newport, KY. Saving CeeCee Honeycutt is her first novel.

Declan Hughes's noir crime series set in contemporary Dublin and featuring Ed Loy started with The Wrong Kind of Blood, which won the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus Award for Best First Novel, and continued with The Color of Blood and The Price of Blood. He recently wrote All The Dead Voices (Morrow, July 2009).

An emergency physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Frank Huyler is the author of the essay collection The Blood of Strangers as well as the novel The Laws of Invisible Things, and most recently Right of Thirst. He grew up in Iran, Brazil, and Japan.

Rebecca Johnson, a freelance writer, has been a contributing editor to Vogue Magazine for the last ten years. She has also contributed to Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Mademoiselle (Contributing Editor) and Talk Magazine (Contributing Editor), among others. She is also the author of And Sometimes Why.

Lesley Kagen is an actress, voice-over talent, and restaurateur. The author of the national bestselling paperbacks Whistling in the Dark and Land of a Hundred Wonders, she lives in Cederburg, Wisconsin.

Christobel Kent was born in London and grew up in London and Essex, including a stint on the Essex coast on a Thames barge with three siblings and four step-siblings, before reading English at Cambridge.  She has worked in publishing and TEFL teaching, and has lived in Modena, in northern Italy, and in Florence.  She has written four novels set in Italy and now lives in Cambridge with her husband and five children.

Sophie Kinsella is the author of the bestselling Shopaholic series, comprising Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, Shopaholic and Sister, Shopaholic Ties the Knot, and Shopaholic and Baby. She is also the author of Can You Keep a Secret?, The Undomestic Goddess, and, Remember Me?. She currently resides in England.

Claire LaZebnik lives in Los Angeles with her TV-writer husband and four children.  She is the author of the novels Knitting Under the Influence and Same As It Never Was and coauthor of Overcoming Autism and the forthcoming Growing Up on the Spectrum.

John Ajvide Lindqvist is a Swedish author who grew up in Blackeberg. Wanting to become something awful and fantastic, he first became a conjurer, and then was a stand-up comedian for twelve years. He has also written for Swedish television.  Lindqvist's debut, the Swedish vampire novel Let the Right One In, has been published in 11 countries. 

Sara Lindsey began writing during her senior year of college. The rest, as they say, is history...or rather, historical romance. Sara divides her time between her native Los Angeles and Manhattan, where she is pursuing her graduate degree in information and library science.

Jim Lynch worked as a journalist in Alaska, Washington, D.C., and across the Pacific Northwest, winning a number of national reporting honours. His critically acclaimed and award-winning first novel, The Highest Tide, was an international bestseller. He lives with his wife and their daughter in Olympia, Washington.

Jayne Lyons has worked as a geologist/geophysicist for fifteen years. 100% Wolf is her first book. She lives with her family in Australia.

Heather and Rose Macdowell, authors of Turning Tables, are identical twins who have waited tables in some of the best (and worst) restaurants in Manhattan, Nantucket, and San Francisco. Today they live on opposite coasts and write by email and ph