Moniza Alvi’s first poetry collection The Country at My Shoulder (OUP, 1993) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes. A Bowl of Warm Air (OUP, 1996) was featured in The Independent on Sunday’s ‘Books of the Year’. Her other collections include Souls (Bloodaxe, 2002) and How the Stone Found its Voice (Bloodaxe, 2005).

Nadeem Aslam’s debut novel, Season of the Rainbirds (Faber, 1993), set in rural Pakistan, won the Betty Trask and the Author's Club Best First Novel awards, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel award. His second novel is Maps for Lost Lovers (Faber, 2004).

Paul Bailey is a novelist, biographer, critic and essayist and has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent novels include Kitty and Virgil (Fourth Estate, 1998) and Uncle Rudolf (Fourth Estate, 2002). He has written two volumes of autobiography: An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond (Penguin, 1990) and A Dog’s Life (Penguin, 2004).

Josephine Balmer is a translator from the Greek and Chair of the Translators’ Association. Her translations are published in: Poems and Fragments by Sappho (Bloodaxe, 1997) and Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe, 2004) .

Susan Bassnett is Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. She is author of over 20 books including Translation Studies, (Routledge, 3rd ed. 2002), Comparative Literature: a Critical Introduction (1993) and her poetry collection Exchanging Lives (Peepal Tress Press, 2002).

Alan Bennett has written nineteen individual television plays, four television series and three cinema films, together with numerous stage plays. His two Talking Heads series are ranked amongst British television's greatest achievements. His articles, reviews and diaries – commissioned by the BBC and the London Review of Books - are collected in Writing Home (Faber, 1994). His most recent play The History Boys was awarded Best Play by the Evening Standard Award and Critics’ Circle Award

Jim Crace is the author many novels, the most recent of which are Quarantine (Viking, 1997), Being Dead (Viking, 1999), The Devil’s Larder (2001) and Six (2003). His novels have been translated into fourteen languages. Quarantine was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction.

Caroline Dawnay is a Literary Agent with Peters Fraser & Dunlop, where she has built a list of clients which has included novelists and non-fiction writers. She also represents a number of writers’ estates. In the 1990s she was, for three years, President of the Association of Authors’ Agents, the body which regulates agency practice.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester and a leading British literary critic. His works include Literary Theory: an Introduction (Blackwells, 1996), The Significance of Theory (Penguin, 1990), and Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (Verso,1995).

Bernardine Evaristo was born in London to a Nigerian father and an English mother. Her first verse novel, Lara, (Angela Royle Publishing, 1997) won the EMMA (Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards) Best Book Award in 1999. A former Poet in Residence at the Museum of London, she won an Arts Council England Writers' Award in 2000. Her verse novel The Emperor’s Babe was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2001 and Soul Tourists is to be published by Hamish Hamilton in 2005. Bernardine has been awarded a NESTA Fellowship which will allow her to pursue her latest project in Europe’s frozen north.

Wilson Harris is a novelist, poet and essayist and is one of the most distinguished contemporary writers in English. In 2001 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liège to coincide with his 80th birthday and with the publication of his latest novel, The Dark Jester. He has published many novels with Faber & Faber including The Guyana Quartet, composed of Palace of the Peacock (1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). He has also written the trilogy Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990).

Chris Holifield is Director of the Poetry Book Society, a specialist poetry bookseller and a book club for everyone who enjoys poetry. The PBS awards the annual T S Eliot Prize for Poetry. The Prize - described by Poet Laureate Andrew Motion as 'the Prize most poets want to win' - was launched in 1993 to celebrate the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and to honour T S Eliot who was a founder Board member of the PBS. The £10,000 prize money is kindly donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot.

Mererid Hopwood is the only woman to have won the Chair and Crown for poetry at the National Eisteddfod, Wales. Her publications are Cerddi Fan Hyn (Gomer Press, 2002) and Singing in Chains (Gomer Press, 2004).

Lisa Jardine combines a scholarly career as a historian with regular appearances on TV and radio and in print journalism. She is currently Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London and an Honorary Fellow of King's College Cambridge. She has judged the Whitebread and Orwell prizes, and chaired the 1997 Orange prize for fiction and the 2002 Man Booker prize.

Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967. He came to England in 1992 to study engineering, and worked in industry before starting to write. He was awarded an MA in Creative Writing by the University of East Anglia. His novels are Little Infamies (Vintage, 2003) and The Maze (Jonathan Cape, 2004).

Hari Kunzru's novel The Impressionist (Penguin, 2002) won the Betty Trask Prize and the 2003 Somerset Maugham award and has been translated into 17 languages and won several prizes. His other publications are Transmission (Penguin, 2004) and Noise (Penguin, 2005).

Toby Litt is a London-based writer whose most recent books of fiction are Exhibitionism (Hamish Hamilton, 2002), Finding Myself (Hamish Hamilton, 2003) and Ghost Story (Hamish Hamilton, 2004). He is co-editor (with Ali Smith) of the British Council New Writing 13 anthology (Picador, 2005).

Bud McLintock is Director of the Whitbread Book Awards. The Whitbread has five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book. For each category there are three judges who select a shortlist of four books, which includes the winner. The criteria are to select well-written, enjoyable books that they would strongly recommend anyone to read.

Kate Mosse is an author and broadcaster. She is the presenter of BBC4's Readers and Writers’ Roadshow and guest presents Saturday Review for Radio 4. Her short stories and articles have appeared in a range of magazines and newspapers. She is the Co-Founder & Honorary Director of the Orange Prize for Fiction set up in 1996 to celebrate outstanding fiction by women from throughout the world. On TV, Kate is the presenter of BBC Four's Readers & Writers’ Roadshow the weekly television book programme.

Andrew Motion is the Poet Laureate. His most recent books of poetry are Salt Water (Faber, 1997), Selected Poems 1976-1997 (Faber, 1998) and Public Property (Faber, 2002). He is also the author of biographies including Philip Larkin: a Writer's Life (Faber, 1993), Keats: A Biography (Faber, 1997) and the novel The Invention of Dr Cake (Faber, 2003).

Michael Schmidt is a poet, critic, novelist and Director of Carcanet Press and editor of PN Review, one of our leading poetry magazines. He is Professor of English and Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. He edited The Harvill Book of 20th Century Poetry in English (Harvill Press, 2000). Recent critical books are The Lives of the Poets (Phoenix, 1999) and The First Poets (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004).

Kamila Shamsie’s novel Salt and Saffron (Bloomsbury, 2000) won her a place on Orange’s list of ’21 Writers for the 21st Century’. Her other novels include Kartography (Bloomsbury, 2002) and Broken Verses (Bloomsbury, 2005).

Nicholas Spice is Publisher of the London Review of Books, a journal dedicated to carrying on the tradition of the English essay. It gives its contributors the space and freedom to develop their ideas at length and in depth. The leading writers, critics and thinkers who are regular contributors to the London Review of Books include Alan Bennett, Jenny Diski, Terry Eagleton, Frank Kermode, John Lanchester, Hilary Mantel, Andrew O'Hagan, Tom Paulin, Adam Phillips, Jacqueline Rose, Colm Tóibín, and James Wood.

George Szirtes is a poet, translator, critic and artist. He has published 13 collections of poems, the most recent of which are An English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe, 2001) and Reel (Bloodaxe, 2004) which won the T S Eliot Prize in 2004. Two of his translation from Hungarian poetry are The Colonnade of Teeth: Twentieth Century Hungarian Poetry (co-editor and translator, Bloodaxe, 1996) and The Night of Akhenaton: Selected Poems of Ágnes Names Nagy (Bloodaxe, November 2003).

Marina Warner is a novelist, cultural critic and mythographer and is Professor of Literature and Film Studies at the University of Essex. She has lectured and published widely. Most recent publications are The Leto Bundle, a novel (Chatto, 2001), Murderers I Have Known, short stories (Vintage, 2004), Fantastic Metamorphoses: Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, criticism (Vintage, 2004) and Signs and Wonders: Essays in Literature & Culture (Vintage, 2004)

Juliet Wragge-Morley is the Web and Information Manager in the Film and Literature Department at the British Council. She currently manages 18 websites of which 16 are literary. They range from Contemporary Writers, the books website enCompassCulture and Literary Translation through to project-specific sites such as I Belong, a multilingual story chain. She publishes two bibliographies a year, the latest are Reel Books: page to screen and Sport in Literature. Juliet started her working life as a laboratory technician researching cancer and the immune system before training as a librarian specialising in computerised information retrieval.

Benjamin Zephaniah is a leading voice in contemporary poetry and his work has been broadcast on the radio and television and his poems work both in performance and on the page. He has published seven plays, seven books for adults and four books for children. He writes: ”My poetry is strongly influenced by the music and poetry of Jamaica and I can't remember a time when I was not creating poetry.” His most recent books are Gansta Rap, prose (Bloomsbury, 2004) and Too Black, Too Strong, poetry (Bloodaxe, 2001). He is also a musician and has produced CDs.