Hurricanes in Perfect Power

Candice Brathwaite is the Sunday Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Baby Mother. She is a contributing editor at Grazia and a presenter on Lorraine, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, Stylist, Metro and Huffington Post. She is also the founder of Make Motherhood Diverse - an online initiative that aims to ensure many more mothers see themselves reflected online - and a hugely popular influencer.

Anita Desai was born and educated in India. Her novels Fasting, Feasting, Clear Light of Day and In Custody, were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was filmed by Merchant Ivory Productions. Anita Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. She lives in New York State, and spends time each year in India and the UK.

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To (nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award), and Don’t Cry, and the novels The Mare, Veronica (nominated for the National Book Award), and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Artforum, and Granta, among many other journals, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

Jamaica Kincaid is the author of many books, including Annie John, A Small Place, and Lucy.

Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels: Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day and Free Love, and four collections of stories: Sunstroke, Married Love, Bad Dreams and After the Funeral. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016 and she has twice been awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, for 2018 and for 2024. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

Helen Simpson’s sixth short-story collection, Cockfosters, follows Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), Dear George (1995), Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), Constitutional (2005) and In-Flight Entertainment (2010). A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories (2012) includes five stories from each of her first five collections. She has received the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M.Forster Award. She lives in London.