Colm Toibin is the author of five novels, including The Master, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004 and won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year, the International Dublin IMPAC Prize, and the Priz de Meilleur Libre in France. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University, where he now teaches. He is a member of the Irish Arts Council and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books.

Gish Jen has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Time Asia and The New York Times, as well as in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. The recipient of a Lannan Award in Literature and of the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has published three novels: Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land and The Love Wife, as well as a collection of stories, Who's Irish? She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been featured in a Bill Moyers' programme on PBS, as well as in a PBS American Masters programme on the American novel.

Acclaimed Indian writer Pankaj Mishra is the author of The New York Time's Notable books Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, and a novel, The Romantics. He contributes literary and political essays to?The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and?The New Yorker, among other publications.