The author of the New York Times Notable Book Ghost Lights and eight other works of fiction, Lydia Millet has won the PEN-USA Award and been a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Bill McKibben is the author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, among other titles; he is the founder of 350.org, which in 2010 organized what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.”

Margaret Atwood is a Booker Prize–winning poet and author of many acclaimed novels, including The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Paolo Bacigalupi is the author of the sci-fi novel The Wind-Up Girl, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards.

T. C. Boyle has a long list of books to his credit, including the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning novel World’s End and The Road to Wellville. His latest novel is When the Killing’s Done.

Toby Litt has written nine novels and two short story collections; in 2003 he was chosen as one of Granta’s twenty Best British Novelists Under Forty.

David Mitchell has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize; his novels include Cloud Atlas and most recently The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of The Mayor’s Tongue and Odds Against Tomorrow.

Kim Stanley Robinson is the Hugo and Nebula prize–winning author of the Mars Trilogy and a trilogy of novels about climate change that go under the title Science in the Capital.

Helen Simpson is a prize-winning short story writer and novelist; in 1993, she was selected as one of Granta’s twenty Best British Novelists Under Forty.

Wu Ming is a collective of five Italian fiction writers, founded in Bologna in January 2000. They co-authored a number of books including 54 and the bestselling novel Q, under the previous pseudonym “Luther Blissett.”