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Elisa Beynon is a vicar’s wife with two young children. She lives in North London.

Brodkey’s short stories for the New Yorker were collected in his 1957 First Love and Other Sorrows. A second collection of short stories, The Abundant Dreamer, appeared in 1988, and his long-awaited novel The Runaway Soul three years later.

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.

Dermot Bolger is a distinguished novelist and playwright. His novels include ‘The Journey Home’, ‘The Woman’s Daughter’, ‘Emily’s Shoes’, and, most recently, ‘A Second Life’. He lives and works in Dublin.

Regula Bochsler is a TV journalist, reporter and producer. She lives in Switzerland.

Colin Beavan is a magazine journalist writing for ‘Esquire’ and ‘Atlantic Monthly’. He gained his Ph.D in applied physics from the University of Liverpool.

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights. The novel’s violence and passion shocked the Victorian public and led to the belief that it was written by a man. Although Emily died young (at the age of 30), her sole complete work is now considered a masterpiece of English literature.