JS Tennant is from North Yorkshire and has worked as a ghostwriter in Switzerland, a translator, for Dalkey Archive Press and PEN International. He is the former editor of adda magazine and before that was poetry editor at The White Review. His writing has appeared in The Independent, Guardian, Observer, Irish Times, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and other places. He is a Trustee of Modern Poetry in Translation.

Tennant is co-author (with Richard Hollis) of Cuba ’62: preludes to a world crisis. A second book about Cuba, Mrs Gargantua, is forthcoming from William Collins: it was the first English-language winner of the Michael Jacobs Award from the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for Journalism, and shortlisted for both the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize and the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award.

Alec Ash is a writer and editor focused on China, where he lived from 2008–2022. He is author of Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016), literary nonfiction about the lives of young Chinese people, which was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He was born in England, and studied English literature at Oxford University. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Sunday Times and elsewhere. He was editor of the China Channel at the Los Angeles Review of Books, contributing author to the book of reportage Chinese Characters (University of California Press, 2012), and co-editor of the anthology While We’re Here (Earnshaw Books, 2015). Currently he is editor of the China Books Review at Asia Society. His new book The Mountains Are High (Scribe, 2024), about city escapees in the countryside of Dali, southwest China, is forthcoming.

Web: alecash.net

Twitter: @alecash

Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice and Professor of Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of many books and articles on psychoanalysis, literature and cultural theory, including How to Read Freud, The Private Life, Not Working, How to Live. What to Do and Losers. A new book on anger, All the Rage, will be published in late 2024. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Author’s website: joshcohenwriter.co.uk

Gavin McCrea's first novel, Mrs Engels (Scribe, 2015), was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Walter Scott Prize, and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, The Sisters Mao (Scribe, 2021), received high acclaim internationally. His first work of non-fiction, Cells (Scribe, 2022), has been longlisted for the Polari Prize for LGBTQ Literature. Most recently, he has been commissioned by Hachette/John Murray to write a novel-of-ideas featuring Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His articles have appeared in The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Dublin Review, Lithub and Catapult.

https://www.gavinmccrea.com/

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of six books, including To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) and The Lonely City (2016). She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages.

Her first novel, Crudo, is a real-time account of the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times, among many other publications. She’s written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans and Chantal Joffe. Her collected essays on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, were published in 2020.

Her most recent book is Everybody: A Book About Freedom (2021). It’s an ambitious survey of the body and its discontents, using the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom.

Laing’s new book is an exploration of gardens and utopia. The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise will be published on 2 May 2024.