Deepa Anappara grew up in Kerala, southern India, and worked as a journalist in cities including Mumbai and Delhi. Her reports on the impact of poverty and religious violence on the education of children won the Developing Asia Journalism Awards, the Every Human has Rights Media Awards, and the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism. A partial of her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award and the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. Published in 2020, it has since been named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, Time and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. Deepa has an MA in Creative Writing and is currently studying for a PhD.Taymour Soomro was born in Lahore, Pakistan. He read law at Cambridge University and Stanford Law School. He has worked as a corporate solicitor in New York and Milan, a law lecturer at a university in Karachi, an agricultural estate manager in rural Pakistan and a publicist for a luxury fashion brand in London. Soomro has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. He has written extensively for the Pakistani news media. His short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Southern Review and Ninth Letter. His debut novel, Other Names for Love, will be published by Harvill Secker in 2022.