A. M. Homes is the author of five novels: This Book Will Save Your Life (Granta Books/Viking US), Music for Torching (Granta Books/Harper Perennial), The End of Alice (Granta Books/Scribner), In a Country of Mothers and Jack (Granta Books/Vintage US); two collections of short stories: The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know (Granta Books/Harper Perennial); and a memoir: The Mistress's Daughter (Granta Books/Viking US). She writes frequently on the arts for magazines ranging from The New Yorker and Art Forum to McSweeney's, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She lives in New York City.

Ian Jack is the editor of Granta.

Meghan O'Rourke is the literary editor of Slate and a co-poetry editor at the Paris Review. Her first book of poems, Halflife, will be published by W. W. Norton in April 2007.

Sigrid Rausing is the publisher of Granta, and the co-founder/owner of Portobello Books, together with her husband, Eric Abraham, and Philip Gwyn-Jones. She is also an anthropologist, whose book, based on her PhD, History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. In 1995 she founded her charitable trust (the Sigrid Rausing Trust). The Trust funds projects and organizations in the areas of Human Rights, Women's Rights and Advocacy, Minority Rights, Environmental Justice, and Social and Economic Rights. In 2004 she was the joint winner of the International Service Human Rights Award, and in 2005 she won a Beacon Special Award for philanthropy. In 2006 she was awarded the Women's Funding Network's, Changing Face of Philanthropy Award. She is the chair of Granta Publications and Portobello Books, and on the board of Human Rights Watch in New York and of the publishing company Atlantic UK.

Edmund White is the author of some twenty books—novels, biographies, travel books, memoirs. He is perhaps best known for his autobiographical novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty (Picador/Vintage US) and The Farewell Symphony (Vintage/Knopf). His biography of Jean Genet was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and is published by Vintage in the US and UK. White currently teaches writing at Princeton.

Paul Yamazaki has been a bookseller since 1970 and has been the principle buyer at City Lights Booksellers for twenty-five years. He has served on the board of directors of several literary and community arts organizations. Among them are the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), Small Press Distribution (SPD) and the Kearney Street Workshop (KSW). Yamazaki was a founding member of the Asian American Jazz Festival which celebrated its twenty-third anniversary in 2004, and was also on the initial advisory board of the San Francisco Jazz Festival.