James Lovegrove is the author of over 70 books, including the novels The Hope, Days, Untied Kingdom, Provender Gleed, and the New York Times bestselling Pantheon series. He has produced eight Sherlock Holmes novels, a collection of Holmes short stories, and a four-volume Conan Doyle/Lovecraft mashup series, The Cthulhu Casebooks. He has also written four tie-in novels for the TV show Firefly, Doctor Strange and Fantastic Four novels for Marvel, and a novel featuring pulp hero Conan the barbarian, Cult of the Obsidian Moon. James has sold well over 60 short stories and published two collections, Imagined Slights and Diversifications. He has produced a dozen short books for readers with reading difficulties, and a four-volume fantasy saga for teenagers, The Clouded World, under the pseudonym Jay Amory. James has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Society Award, the Manchester Book Award, the Scribe Award and the Costigan Award. His short story “Carry The Moon In My Pocket” won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Short Story, and Firefly: The Ghost Machine won the 2020 Dragon Award for Best Media Tie-in Novel. His work has been translated into twenty languages, and his journalism has appeared in periodicals as diverse as The Literary Review, Interzone, BBC MindGames, All About History, The Baker Street Journal, SFX and Comic Heroes. He contributes regular fiction review columns to the Financial Times and lives with his wife Lou in Eastbourne.

Lavanya Lakshminarayan is the author of The Ten Percent Thief, which was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA and Locus Awards and featured in Reactor’s Best Books of 2021, and of the critically lauded Interstellar MegaChef, whose sequel Intergalactic Feast is out in 2026. She is the first science fiction writer to win the Times of India AutHer Award and the Valley of Words Award, both prestigious literary awards in India. She’s occasionally a game designer, and has built worlds for Zynga Inc.’s FarmVille franchise, Mafia Wars, and other games. She lives in India.

MK Hardy is the pen name for Morag Hannah and Erin Hardee, two geeky women living and writing together in Scotland. They are both communications specialists working in higher education. With backgrounds ranging from museum interpretation to web design, and from science communication to ghost tours, they are devoted to storytelling in almost every aspect of their lives and work. When they are not telling stories they can be found singing in choirs, foraging for fungi, and working on their 1880s fixer-upper. Their debut sapphic gothic horror The Needfire was published by Solaris in July 2025.