Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels including the international besteller What I Loved, The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Memories of the Future, as well as five collections of essays: Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, A Plea for Eros, Living, Thinking, Looking and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. She has also published a poetry collection, Reading To You, and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.

Hustvedt has won the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and the European Essay Prize for her essay The Delusions of Certainty. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tali Lavi is a critic, writer and public interviewer whose work has appeared in Australian Book Review, The Saturday Paper and Sydney Review of Books amongst others. ‘Counting’, an essay, was published in Marina Benjamin’s Garden Among Fires: A Lockdown Anthology. Tali has interviewed writers for festivals including Adelaide Writers’ Week, Melbourne Jewish Book Week, Melbourne Writers Festival and Sydney Writers’ Festival.