A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

TOMMY ORANGE is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award. He lives in Oakland, California.

ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Summer, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, and How to be both, which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has four times been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.

Naomi Alderman has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and another one in Classical Studies. Also an MA in Creative Writing and another MA in Classics. She’s an award-winning novelist, broadcaster, TV producer and videogames creator. She has worked in technology startups for more than 20 years, since the time when people in tech still felt utopian about “making the world a better place”. Which now makes her feel slightly embarrassed about her naivety. She is the author of the bestselling, multi-award-winning The Power, which was chosen as a book of the year by both Bill Gates and Barack Obama and became a TV series for Amazon Prime. Her other books include The Future, The Liars’ Gospel, The Lessons and Disobedience She is the co-creator of the fitness game and audio adventure Zombies, Run! which has more than ten million players. Naomi writes and presents Human Intelligence, a history of thinking on BBC Radio 4.

Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of seven novels, including Peaces, Gingerbread, and Boy, Snow, Bird, and of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. Winner of the PEN Open Book and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Oyeyemi was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.

Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Charlie Kaufman is the screenwriter of many films, such as Anomalisa; Synecdoche, New York; Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and Being John Malkovich. He won an Academy Award for his work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has been nominated three additional times. Kaufman is also a three-time BAFTA winner for screenwriting, and he has been nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, among many other film honors.

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.