Julia Armfield is a fiction writer, living in London with her girlfriend who is fine and their cat who is garbage. Her work has been published in Granta, The White Review, Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021, Lighthouse and various other publications. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Prize 2018 and was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award.

Her debut collection, salt slow, was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020 and was shortlisted for the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction 2020.

Our Wives Under The Sea was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022 and is shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2023. Her story ‘Longshore Drift’ won a Pushcart Prize in 2020.

Tanya Kirk is Lead Curator, Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900 at the British Library and co-curator of the exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination. She has edited several Tales of the Weird anthologies: Haunters at the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights, Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season and Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings.

Zara-Louise Stubbs is the editor of the British Library Tales of the Weird collection The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird (2023). She is a PhD researcher in literature with an interest in the medical humanities. Zara’s research explores food studies, mysticism, and gendered embodiment in contemporary writing, seeking out all things surreal, subversive, and strange.

Matthew Sweet is a writer and broadcaster. He is author of Inventing the Victorians (2001), Shepperton Babylon (2005) and The West End Front (2011). A familiar voice in British broadcasting, he presents Free Thinking and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3 and The Philosopher’s Arms on BBC Radio 4.

He has judged the Costa Book Award, edited The Woman in White for Penguin Classics and was Series Consultant on the Showtime/Sky Atlantic series Penny Dreadful. In the BBC2 drama An Adventure in Space and Time he played a moth from the planet Vortis. His fashion history column, The Line of Beauty, appears in 1843 magazine. His latest book, Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers and Themselves is published by Picador.

Matthew Holness is a writer, actor and comedian who won the Perrier Comedy Award in 2001 and went on to co-create and star in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace for Channel 4. His short films include A Gun For George, The Snipist and Smutch. His short stories have appeared in Beyond the Veil, Black Static Magazine, At Ease With the Dead, Phobic, The New Uncanny, Protest and The Best Horror of the Year. He wrote and directed the 2018 horror feature, Possum, and his audio adaptation of M.R. James’s ‘The Ash Tree’ for Bafflegab Productions recently won Best Drama Special (Gold) at the 2020 New York Festivals Radio Awards. Garth Marenghi's TERRORTOME was published by Hodder in 2022 and was an instant Sunday Times Bestseller. His follow-up, INCARCERAT was published on Halloween 2023.