Dr. Mary Doria Russell won the Arthur C. Clarke science fiction award for her first novel The Sparrow about a linguist who visits an alien world. She followed this up with a sequel, Children of God, World War II thriller, A Thread of Grace and political romance set in 1921 Cairo Dreamers of the Day. With her novels Doc and Epitaph, Russell has redefined two towering figures of the American West: the lawman Wyatt Earp and the dental surgeon Doc Holliday. She studied cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois, social anthropology at Northeastern University in Boston, and received her doctorate in biological anthropology from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Gwyneth Lewis was Wales's National Poet from 2005-06, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. She wrote the six-foot-high words on the front of Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre, rumoured to be the largest poem in the world. Gwyneth has published nine books of poetry in Welsh and English, as well as documentaries, plays and non-fiction and novels. In 2006 she was Writer in Residence at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University and in 2013 was commissioned to write poems by CERN. Prizes include the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, the Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award, the Mental Health in the Media award, Y Goron (the Crown) at the National Eisteddfod, and a BAFTA Wales for Best Drama. She was a lecturer at Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University, and is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.