Contributors

Alice Ash is a writer and maker of short films. Her story 'Eggs' was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Prize 2019, and her writing has been featured in Hotel, 3:AM Magazine, the TLS and Extra Teeth, among others. She is based in Brighton. Find her on Twitter as @aliceash_.

Jami Attenberg is the author of a story collection, Instant Love, and the novels The Kept Man, The Melting Season, All Grown Up, Saint Mazie and The Middlesteins, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She has been published in sixteen languages. She lives in New Orleans. Follow her @jamiattenberg

Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. After studying and briefly teaching philosophy, a period of left-wing tourism in France and Italy led to his learning to read and converse in these languages, and to take part in the intense, opaque discourses of Marxism. A period of work as translator led to a job as editor with Pluto Press and to his founding in 1986 of Serpent's Tail with the specific remit of publishing fiction in translation; this includes two First World War classics, Frederic Manning's Her Privates We and Gabriel Chevallier's Fear, both represented in No Man's Land.

Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, Alain Badiou is a leading French philosopher. With Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, he has reclaimed for the radical left the concepts of being, truth and the subject. A lifelong communist, he is the author of The Meaning of Sarkozy, Being and Event, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and The Communist Hypothesis.

Gaynor Arnold was born in Wales, but now lives in Birmingham. Her 2008 debut novel Girl in a Blue Dress (based on the marriage of Charles Dickens) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize; and shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize. It was published worldwide and translated into several languages. Gaynor's short story collection Lying Together, partly based on her experiences as a social worker, came out in 2011 and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Her second novel, After Such Kindness (exploring the relationship between Lewis Carroll and his child-muse Alice) was published in 2012. Gaynor has also co-edited The Sea in Birmingham with Julia Bell.

Katherine Ashenburg has worked as an academic, a CBC Radio producer and the Arts and Books editor of the Globe and Mail. She has written for the New York Times and her books include and The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die. She lives in Toronto.

Kalinda Ashton was born in Melbourne in 1978. She has been involved in student, union and community campaigns. She is an associate editor of Overland magazine, and a teacher of writing and editing. The Danger Game is her first novel.

Anna Aslanyan is a journalist, translator and public service interpreter. She contributes to
the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and other UK-based publications, writing
about books and arts. Her translations from Russian include Post-Post Soviet? Art,
Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade, a collection of essays edited by
Ekaterina Degot et al. (University of Chicago Press, 2013); contemporary short stories for
Best European Fiction (Dalkey Archive, 2013, 2018); and A Journey to Inner Africa, a
19th-century travelogue by Egor Kovalevsky (Amherst College Press, 2020). Her popular
history of translation, Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History, was
published by Profile in May 2021.

David Astle is a Melbourne-based writer of non-fiction, fiction and drama. He co-hosts Letters and Numbers (the Australian version of Countdown) as the dictionary expert, and his crosswords appear in Australian papers The Ageand Sydney Morning Herald.

Ray Axford took up archery in 1975 and qualified as a County Coach in 1982. He has coached throughout the Southern Region and has also lectured widely on human anatomy and biomechanics. He has provided illustrations for the National Coaching Manual and has written and illustrated articles for archery magazines. Formerly senior designer and development engineer for an aircraft instrument company, he was responsible for several innovative aircraft and missile control systems and later, as a design consultant, he was involved in the concept and design of various advanced technology projects in America, Europe and the United Kingdom.

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than 45 countries, is the author of more than 50 works of fiction, poetry, critical essays and graphic novels, including The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye and The MaddAddam Trilogy. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. She is the recipient of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize and the PEN Centre USA Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her latest collection is Old Babes in the Wood.

Reinaldo Arenas was born in Holguín, Cuba, in 1943. His first novel, Singing from the Well, was awarded First Mention in Cuba's Cirilo Villaverde National Competition. It was to be his only book published in his native country. Both as a homosexual and a writer, he found himself persecuted by the Cuban government, and had to smuggle his work out of the country for publication in France. He left Cuba in 1980 and settled in New York, where he died of AIDS in 1990. He is the author of over 20 books, including novels, short stories and poems.

Oana was born in Transylvania, to parents of Romanian, Greek and Yemeni background. After the fall of communism the family emigrated to Sweden. Oana has worked in the City of London as a macroeconomist, and as an advisor to the Romanian prime minister, but since 2018 she has lived on a Greek island, converting a heritage villa into a hotel.

Roberto Arlt was born in Buenos Aires in 1900, the son of a Prussian immigrant from Poznán, Poland. Brought up in the city's crowded tenement houses – the same tenements which feature in The Seven Madmen – Arlt had a deeply unhappy childhood and left home at the age of sixteen. As a journalist, Arlt described the rich and vivid life of Buenos Aires; as an inventor, he patented a method to prevent ladders in women's stockings. Arlt died suddenly of a heart attack in Buenos Aires in 1942. He was the author of the novels The Mad Toy, The Flamethrowers, Love the Enchanter and several plays.