Yang Lian was born in Switzerland and grew up in Beijing. He went into exile following the Tian’anmen Square massacre in 1989. He has published ten collections of poems, two of prose and many essays in Chinese. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He has lived in London since 1997.

Zoe Gilbert’s short stories have appeared in anthologies and journals worldwide, and she won the Costa Short Story Award 2014. Her first book,Folk, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2018. She is working on a PhD on folk tales and the short story.

Zou Jingzhi (b. 1952) is an acclaimed playwright, poet and prose writer. Extremely influential as a poet in the 1980s, he continues to shape public opinion through his screenplays, which include Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (dir. Zhang Yimou) and The Grandmaster (dir. Wong Kar Wai). He is a founding member of theatre collective Longmashe, which regularly produces his plays. His opera The Night Banquet was performed in English translation at Lincoln Centre in New York in 2002.

Wes Lee lives in New Zealand. Her work has appeared in a wide array of publications. She has won a number of awards, including The Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Award in Galway, and The Short Fiction Writing Prize (University of Plymouth Press).

Yvonne Cullen works as a creative writing teacher. Her first poetry collection, Invitation to the Air, won the American Ireland Fund Award in 1997 and was published by Italics press in 1998. Yvonne’s poems appear in 2004’s New Irish Poets from Bloodaxe Books, among other anthologies. Showtown, her non-fiction account of a showpeoples’ caravan park in Dublin, and of the twentieth century world of Ireland’s travelling shows, will appear at the end of 2012.

Yan Ge is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English. She is the author of thirteen books in Chinese, including six novels. Yan started to write in English in 2016. Since then, her writing has been published in The New York Times, TLS, Brick and elsewhere.

Wendy Ogden writes by the sea in East Sussex. Publications include articles and short stories which have also won a couple of prizes. She has published articles in The Lady and The New Writer, and she is working on her second novel.

Zakia Uddin is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

William Wall is the author of four novels, three collections of poetry and two volumes of short fiction. His work has won many prizes including the Drue Heinz Prize, The Virginia Faulkner Award, The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Sean O’Faolain Prize and many more. He was longlisted for The Man Booker Prize. His work has been translated into many languages and he translates from Italian. ‘Wall, who is also a poet, writes prose so charged—at once lyrical and syncopated—that it’s as if Cavafy had decided to write about a violent Irish household.’ (The New Yorker)

Trevor Joyce, a native of central Dublin, has now lived half his life in Cork city. He was co-founder of the New Writers’ Press (Dublin, 1967) and SoundEye (Cork, 1997). Recent books include his Selected Poems (2014) and Fastness (2017). He is a member of Aosdána.

Trevor Fevin recently completed an MA in creative writing at Edge Hill
University. He has previously been published in St Sebastian Review and Best
British Short Stories 2016.

Trevor Ketner is the author of Major Arcana: Minneapolis, winner of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest judged by Diane Seuss. They have been or will be published in Best New Poets, New England Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, Diagram and elsewhere. They live in Manhattan with their husband.

Vincent McDonnell was a judge for the 2009 Cork City – Frank O’Connor Award.

Wendy Ann Greenhalgh is a writer, artist, author and creative mindfulness teacher. Her short fiction and poetry have been published by Stinging Fly, Mslexia, Bare Fiction, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Flash – The International Short Short Magazine. She’s the author of Mindfulness & the Art of Drawing (2015) and Stop Look Breathe Create (2017). She shares her writing and art on social media using #stoplookbreathecreate, and invites you to say hello on Facebook: Art of Mindfulness – Twitter: @_wendyann – Instagram: @artomfindfulness or at https://artofmindfulness.wordpress.com/

Val Nolan’s definitive history of the John McGahern banning appeared in Irish Studies Review (2011) while his story ‘The Irish Astronaut’ was shortlisted for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Award. He lectures at Aberystwyth University.

Tulis McCall is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles. She is the creator of a two one-person plays: ‘What Everywoman Knows’-a stand-up historical comedy based on the history of American women-and ‘Running With Scissors-an Urban Tale’.

Victoria Kennefick’s first collection, ‘Eat or We Both Starve’, is published by Carcanet Press. Her pamphlet, ‘White Whale’ (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet.

Usha Kishore hails from South India but now lives on the Isle of Man. A schoolteacher by profession, Usha is currently undertaking a PhD in Poetry ( Open University). Her poetry has been published in the UK and in India.

Víctor Balcells Matas holds a BA in Humanities and Audiovisual Communication and an MA in Scientific Journalism from the University of Salamanca. He has worked for La Vanguardia and El Diario de Ibiza and with literary publishers Blackie Books and Duomo Ediciones. His debut short story collection Yo Mataré Monstruos por Ti (I Will Kill Monsters for You) is currently being translated into English and French. His debut novel is due in October 2013 from Alfabia, where he currently works as editor of foreign editions.
http://huesosdesepia.blogspot.com http://zafarranchosmerulanos.blogspot.com

Tony Murray is Director of the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University. He researches literary and cultural representations of migration and diaspora and his book, London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity is published by Liverpool University Press.

Victoria Sprow was a 2007 US Mitchell Scholar and will receive her MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College this winter. She did her undergraduate work in English at Harvard University and is currently studying for an MFA in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is at work on a novel.

Tory Campbell is a graduate of Goldsmiths College in Fine Art/Art History. She lives and works in Belfast, presently a tutor to adults with learning disabilities. She has been attending the Seamus Heaney Centre Writers’ Group for three years. This is her first published poem.

Tony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955. An award-winning poet, he has published four collections of poetry, the latest being Three Songs Of Home (Dedalus, 1998). A new collection, What Darkness Covers, is forthcoming. He is a member of Aosdana.

Vasyl Gabor is a well-known Ukrainian journalist, short story writer and compiler of anthologies of contemporary writing. He was awarded both the Kurylas Family Prize and Kovalev Literary Prize. Gabor’s short stories have been translated into English, German, Serbian, Slovak, Croatian, Czech, Japanese and Bulgarian; principally A Book of Exotic Dreams and Real Events, Lviv, Piramida, 2012. Some of these stories have also appeared in Ukrainian Literature: a Journal of Translations http://www.utoronto.ca/elul/.

Vona Groarke has published six books with the Gallery Press, including four poetry collections, the latest of which is Juniper Street (2006) . Lament for Art O’Leary, her version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s ‘Chaoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire’, was published in April 2008.

Valerie Sirr has published and broadcast many stories and has won several awards. She was shortlisted for the Hennessy Awards in 1998. She completed a collection of short stories while at Trinity College and has recently written a screenplay.

Tony Devlin is a Dubliner, born in 1952 and married with four grown-up children. Living in Blanchardstown, Tony has been writing poems and stories intermittently for most of his adult life.

Viv McDade was born in Belfast, grew up in Africa, and now lives in Dublin. An English literature and psychology graduate, with an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College, her stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies and have been read on radio.

Todd Swift is a Canadian poet based in London. His Seaway: New and Selected Poems was published by Salmon in 2008. He is currently a lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University. He is Oxfam Great Britain’s Poet-in-residence.

Toby Litt was born in Bedfordshire, England, in 1968. His books include Adventures in Capitalism (1996) Beatniks: An English Road Movie (1997), Corpsing (2000), Deadkidsongs (2001), Exhibitionism (2002), Finding Myself (2003) and Ghost Story (2004). In 2003 Toby Litt was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in London and his website is www.tobylitt.com.