A delightful and unique collection of stories from some of the greatest writers of recent years
Editor: Caroline Heaton is a children's librarian and author. She has co-edited two anthologies of short stories.
Editor: Christine Park has co-edited two collections of short stories with Caroline Heaton, including Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters.
Margaret Atwood is Canada's most eminent novelist, poet and critic. Her books include The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Alias Grace, Cat's Eye, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and The Handmaid's Tale, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction and the Governor-General's Award, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and made into a major film. She lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson and their daughter.
John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels & stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958. His novel G. won the Booker Prize in 1972. He lives in France.
A. S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. Her most recent novel is A Whistling Woman, the conclusion of the famous 'Frederica' quartet.
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and was educated in Europe. One of the most widely acclaimed writers of our time, he published many collections of poems, essays and short stories before his death in Geneva in 1986. He was director of the Argentine National Library from 1955 until 1973. Mario Vargas Llosa, in a tribute to Borges, has written: 'His is a world of clear, pure, and at the same time unusual ideas expressed in words of great directness and restraint. [He] was a superb storyteller. One reads most of Borges' tales with the hypnotic interest usually reserved for reading detective fiction...'
Leonora Carrington was born in April 1917. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art and became a painted, heavily influenced by surrealist artist such as Max Ernst. She is the author of ten books. She lives in Mexico.
Doris Lessing was born in 1919. The Grass Is Singing, her first novel, was published in 1950, and she has since gone on to publish more than fifty books. Named a Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature in Great Britain, she has been awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize, Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalonia Prize, and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in North London.
Ben Okri has published many books, including The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize in1991, Songs of Enchantment, Astonishing the Gods, Dangerous Love and In Arcadia. He has also published two books of poems, Mental Flight and An African Elegy, and a collection of non-fiction, A Way of Being Free.He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2000 he was awarded an OBE for services to literature. Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria and lives in London.
