Tracy Chevalier FRSL is the author of ten novels. She is best known for the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been translated into 43 languages, sold over 5 million copies worldwide, and been made into a film, play, radio drama, and opera. Her new novel about Venetian glass, The Beadmaker, will be published later in 2023. She grew up in Washington DC and in 1984 moved to the UK, dividing her time between London and Dorset.

William Sutcliffe was born in London in 1971. He is the author of five previous novels: the international bestseller Are You Experienced?; The Love Hexagon; New Boy; Bad Influence and, most recently, Whatever Makes You Happy. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. He lives in Edinburgh

Jeremy Gavron is the author of two non-fiction books and three novels, including The Book of Israel, winner of the Encore Award, and An Acre of Barren Ground. A former foreign correspondent in Africa and India, he now lives in London and teaches at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.

Charlotte Mendelson has written four novels, one non-fiction book about her tragic gardening obsession, Rhapsody in Green, much literary journalism and work for radio, and is Gardening Correspondent for the New Yorker. Her most recent novel, Almost English, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. When We Were Bad was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year in the Observer, Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Spectator. Her second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award.