Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly and one of the best books of the 21st century by the New York Times Book Review. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year.

Kevin Kwan is the author of Crazy Rich Asians, the international bestselling novel that has been translated into 40 languages. Its sequel, China Rich Girlfriend, was released in 2015, and Rich People Problems, the final book in the trilogy, followed in 2017. For several weeks in 2018, the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy commanded the top three positions of the New York Times bestseller list—an almost unprecedented single-author trifecta, and the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians became Hollywood’s highest grossing romantic comedy in over a decade. Sex and Vanity, his most recent novel, hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of release and is being adapted into a feature film by Sony Pictures. Kevin has been named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Helen Fielding is a British novelist, screenwriter and journalist, best known as the creator of Bridget Jones. Helen’s first novel was set in a refugee camp in Africa, and she started writing Bridget as an anonymous column in the Independent newspaper. This turned into an unexpected hit, leading to four Bridget Jones novels, and three Bridget Jones movies with a fourth movie – Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – recently released. The novels have been translated into over 40 languages and the novels and movies became international bestsellers and box office hits.

Fielding continued to work for British newspapers and on documentaries including the Thames TV Documentary Where Hunger is a Weapon about the war in South Sudan.

In 2024 the New York Times selected Bridget Jones’s Diary as one of the twenty-two funniest novels since Catch 22 and, in 2016 the BBC’s Woman’s Hour chose Bridget Jones as one of the seven women who have most influenced female culture over the last seven decades – despite not actually being a real person.

Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Growing up in the Bronx among communists and socialists, Gornick became a legendary writer for Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s, and a respected literary critic. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments — ranked the best memoir of the last fifty years by the New York Times — The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, as well as the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.

Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and a co-host of the magazine’s Critics at Large podcast. She was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2015.