Damian Grant taught at the University of Manchester, and latterly at the University of Lille in France, where he now mainly lives. His early work was on the eighteenth-century novel, with a book on Smollett and an edition for OUP; he continues to publish in this area, with essays on Swift and Sterne, and reviews in The Scriblerian. A book on realism signalled a move to more general critical concerns, and he became more involved with twentieth-century fiction and poetry, with publications on D H Lawrence, Christine Brooke-Rose, Ian McEwan and Christopher Hope, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison. His book on Salman Rushdie was published in the British Council Writers and Their Work series in 1999, and he is preparing a new edition.

Damian Grant's poems have appeared in various journals, and a selection of his Shaiku (Shakespeare's sonnets rewritten as haiku) was recently published in PN Review. He spent a year at the University of Tunis in 1976-1977, and has made shorter visits to many countries, often at the invitation of the British Council. He has been co-chairman of the Cambridge Seminar for many years.

Rachel Holmes is a writer. Formerly an academic, she was Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, and Queen Mary, London University. In 1998, she left her tenured academic post to join the launch team of Amazon.co.uk as Senior Editor, and became Web Site Manager of the Amazon UK site until leaving in December 2002 to write full time. Her first book Scanty Particulars, a biography of Dr James Barry, was published in 2002, by Penguin in the UK and Random House in the US. She is currently completing her second book, Sara Baartman: The Hottentot Venus, which will be published by Bloomsbury UK and Random House US in 2006. Rachel has judged several literary prizes, including the Whitbread Book Awards and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and is a literary journalist, reviewer, and broadcaster on radio and television, including Newsnight Review and The Culture Show.

She is a founder and Secretary of the UK-based HIV/AIDS organisation FOTAC (Friends of the Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa), and an editorial consultant to George Soros's Open Society Institute.