Birds, Strangers and Psychos

Anne Billson is a film critic and author. She lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Jeff Noon is an award-winning British novelist, short story writer and playwright. He won the Arthur C Clarke Award for Vurt, the John W Campbell award for Best New Writer, a Tinniswood Award for innovation in radio drama and the Mobil prize for playwriting. He was trained in the visual arts, and was musically active on the punk scene before starting to write plays for the theatre. His previous book, The Body Library, was nominated for the Philip K Dick Award.

Donna Moore was born in 1962 and led a sheltered childhood in a small English village. A crime fiction fan from a young age, Donna wanted to be one of Enid Blyton's Famous Five and fight crime with the aid of only a basket of cucumber sandwiches and a bottle of ginger beer. She spent her spare time following mysterious strangers around the village - especially those with cockney accents and a couple of days' growth of stubble - until a complaint from the new local vicar put a stop to her sleuthing career.

Denise Mina is the author of the novels The Red Road, Gods and Beasts, The End of the Wasp Season, Still Midnight, Slip of the Knife, The Dead Hour, The Field of Blood, Deception and the Garnethill Trilogy, the first installment of which won her the John Creasey Memorial Award for best first crime novel. Mina has twice received the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. She lives in Glasglow.

Peter Swanson is the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year; and Eight Perfect Murders, a New York Times bestseller, among others. His books have been translated into 30 languages. He lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts, where he is at work on his next novel.

David Thomson is the author of more than twenty-five books, including The Biographical Dictionary of Film, biographies of Orson Welles and David O. Selznick, and the pioneering novel Suspects, which featured characters from film. He lives in San Francisco, California.