Tomoka Shibasaki was born in 1973 in Osaka and began writing fiction while still in high school. After graduating from university, she took an office job but continued writing, and was shortlisted for the Bungei Prize in 1998. Her first book, A Day on the Planet, was turned into a hit movie, and Spring Garden won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2014.

Elisabeth Gifford grew up in a vicarage in the industrial Midlands. She studied French literature and world religions at Leeds University. She has a Diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford OUDCE and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway College. She is the author of five previous historical novels, including The Good Doctor of Warsaw and The Lost Lights of St Kilda. She is married with three children, and lives in Kingston upon Thames.

William Saroyan (1908-1981) was born in California, the son of Armenian immigrants who escaped from the genocidal Turkish Ottoman Empire. His father - a preacher and poet who became a farm labourer - died when Saroyan was three, forcing the children to be briefly placed in an orphanage. Saroyan left school at fifteen, determined to become a writer and supporting himself through odd jobs. His first story collection was an instant bestseller in 1934 and fame ensued (he's mentioned in Breakfast at Tiffany's!) It was followed by dozens of celebrated novels, stories and plays including The Time of Your Life - for which he refused the 1939 Pulitzer Prize on the grounds that commerce should not judge art - and The Human Comedy, which won a 1944 Academy Award for his screenplay. In the 1940s he worked for Columbia and MGM in Hollywood, as well as travelling through the Soviet Union and Europe. Saroyan lived mainly in Paris from 1958, writing voraciously until his death in 1981.Stephen Fry was born in London in 1957 and educated at Cambridge, where he joined the Footlights and met Hugh Laurie. His television credits include A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, Blackadder and QI, and he is a regular contributor to radio shows and films as well as the audiobook narrator for Harry Potter. Fry is also the author of many bestselling novels, including The Liar, The Hippopotamus, Making History and The Stars' Tennis Balls, as well as a series of autobiographies - Moab is my Washpot, The Fry Chronicles and More Fool Me - and Mythos, Heroes and Troy, his retellings of Greek myths.