Cooked Up

Elaine Chiew is a London-based writer, and her short stories have won the Bridport Prize (2008), Camera Obscura's Bridge-the-Gap competition (2010), been shortlisted for the 2014 MsLexia Prize, and been shortlisted twice for the Fish Short Story Prize (2012). They have also been selected by Dzanc Books' Best of the Web (2008), Wigleaf's Top 50 Microfiction (2008), storySouth's Million Writers Award (Top 10 Winner, 2006), the Per Contra Prize (Top 10 Winner, 2008) and Glimmer Train's Top 25 Emerging Writers Competition (2005). They've also appeared in numerous books, including One World: A Global Anthology (New Internationalist, 2009) and Short Circuit: Guide to the Art of the Short Story (Salt, 2009). She is the editor and organizer of this anthology. She blogs about food and fiction on redemptioninthekitchen.blogspot.com

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian American writer and an author, poet, activist and teacher. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, the O Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese, and many of them have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her works have been made into films and plays. She lives in Houston with her husband Murthy and has two sons, Anand and Abhay, who are in college.

Rachel J Fenton was born in 1976, grew up in South Yorkshire and currently lives in Auckland. Shortlisted for the 2014 Dundee International Book Prize, she was previously shortlisted for the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize and won Short Fiction's 7th Annual Competition). AKA Rae Joyce, she is featured in New Zealand Comics and Graphic Novels (Hicksville Press), Two Thirds North (University of Stockholm, 2014), was Artist in Residence at Counterexample Poetics, and won AUT's Graphic Fiction Prize. She blogs at http://snowlikethought.blogspot.com

Diana Ferraro is an Argentine bilingual writer. For a decade, she shuttled between homes in Richmond, Virginia, and Buenos Aires, where she lives now. She has published several books of fiction and essays in Spanish, among them La Argentina como Marca and La Conspiración de los Artistas. Her new works in English - The French Lesson, a novel, and two collections of short stories, The Map of Solitude and The Bells - have been published as ebooks at Amazon.

Vanessa Gebbie is a Welsh novelist, short story writer, poet and editor. Her publications include The Coward's Tale (a novel, Bloomsbury), Words from a Glass Bubble and Storm Warning (short story collections, Salt Modern Fiction), and The Half-life of Fathers (poetry, Pighog). She is also contributing editor of Short Circuit: Guide to the Art of the Short Story, editions 1 and 2 (Salt). She is currently writing her second novel, more short stories, and collaborating on a further poetry collection, due to be published in 2016. She teaches writing. Her awards include an Arts Council Grant for the Arts, a Bridport Prize and the Troubadour Prize. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow, and Writer in Residence at both Gladstone's Library and Stockholm University. vanessagebbie.com @vanessagebbie

Pippa Goldschmidt is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Previously an astronomer, her first novel 'The Falling Sky' (Freight Books) was a runner-up in the Dundee International Book Prize for 2012. She was writer-in-residence at ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, University of Edinburgh (2008-2010). She has a Masters degree in creative writing from the University of Glasgow and was a winner of a Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award for 2011/12. Her short stories, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in a wide variety of publications including Gutter, New Writing Scotland, the New York Times and anthologies such as Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poetry from the UK (Penned in the Margins, 2012). Her short story collection will be published in 2015.

Sue Guiney is an American writer and educator living in London. She has published two poetry collections and three novels and has had work published in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic. She was the Writer-in-Residence in the SE Asian Department of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Although Sue has written widely on a variety of subjects, most of her work and inspiration now comes from Cambodia. She has founded a creative writing workshop for at-risk children called 'Writing Through Cambodia', where she spends several months a year teaching. Sue is writing a series of novels set in modern-day, post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, the latest of which, Out of the Ruins, was published in early 2014.

Patrick Holland grew up in outback Queensland and spent his young life working with cattle and horses. His best-known novel, The Mary Smokes Boys, tells the story of a band of young horse thieves in the hills west of Brisbane and their jealousies concerning a young sister. It was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year. His most recent book The Darkest Little Room is a thriller set in Saigon, the city he has lived in for three years. His Scott Prize-winning story collection The Source of the Sound, and his collection of travel essays Riding the Trains in Japan, both explore 21st-century placelessness and transience. Navigatio, a meditation on St Brendan's journeys in the Atlantic, is due in October 2014.

Roy Kesey was born and raised in northern California, and currently lives with his wife and children in Maryland. His latest book is a short story collection called Any Deadly Thing. He's also the author of a novel called Pacazo (the January 2011 selection for The Rumpus Book Club), a collection of short stories called All Over (a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, and one of The L Magazine's Best Books of the Decade), a novella called Nothing in the World (winner of the Bullfight Media Little Book Award), and a historical guide to the city of Nanjing, China. His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, New Sudden Fiction, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and The Future Dictionary of America, and in more than 80 magazines, including McSweeney's, Subtropics, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review and Ninth Letter.

Charles Lambert was born in 1953 in England but, apart from brief spells in Ireland, Portugal and London, has lived and worked in Italy since 1976. He is the author of With a Zero at its Heart, an autobiographical fiction in 241 linked paragraphs, each of 120 words. He has also published three novels, Little Monsters, Any Human Face and The View from the Tower, a collection of prize-winning stories, The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories, and a novella, The Slave House.

Krys Lee is the author of the short story collection Drifting House, published by Viking/Penguin, US, and Faber & Faber, UK. She is the recipient of the 2014-2015 Rome Prize fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2012 Story Prize Spotlight Award, and a finalist for the 2012 BBC International Story Prize. Her fiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in several national magazines and newspapers. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Yonsei University, Underwood International College.

Stefani Nellen currently lives in the Netherlands with her family. One of her stories won first place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and she has also had stories in Cosmos, Web Conjunctions, and forthcoming in Flash Fiction International, among others. She will start her MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College, Vermont, in 2015. Contact: stefani.nellen@gmail.com

Mukoma Wa Ngugi, an Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Black Star Nairobi (Melville, 2013), Nairobi Heat (Melville, 2011) and Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006). New African in 2013 named him one of the 100 most influential Africans.

Ben Okri has published eight novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore. He is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He was born in Nigeria and lives in London.

Susannah Rickards grew up in the Northeast of England and now lives in London. She read English at Oxford and is currently in the final year of a PhD in creative writing at Northumbria University. Her writing has won and been shortlisted for a number of prizes including Commonwealth Short Story, International Pen, Society of Authors Tom-Gallon, Hawthornden Fellowship and the Conan Doyle. It has been published in literary magazines, anthologized, broadcast on BBC Radio and The Independent newspaper. Her first collection of short stories, Hot Kitchen Snow, is published by Salt. She recently completed her first novel and is represented by Jane Gregory of Gregory & Co.

Nikesh Shukla is a writer of fiction and television. His debut novel Coconut Unlimited was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Nikesh is also the author of a food novella, The Time Machine, and co-wrote Generation Vexed: What the Riots Don't Tell Us About Our Nation's Youth with Kieran Yates. His short stories have been featured in Best British Short Stories 2013, Five Dials, the Sunday Times, Book Slam and BBC Radio 4. He wrote a Channel 4 Comedy Lab called Kabadasses and hosts The Subaltern podcast. Nikesh lives in Bristol and was born in London.