Ruth Padel & Min Jin Lee

Ruth Padel is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her nature writing and connections with music, science, Greece and conservation. Padel has won the UK National Poetry Competition and published six collections of poetry, celebrated for glittering imagery, and for "passion, wit, music, texture and elegance.” Her collection Voodoo Shop (2002) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Whitbread Prizes. "Visual, sensuous and highly seductive, as if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in," said the Times Literary Supplement. She is a great great grand-daughter of Charles Darwin and a Fellow of The Zoological Society of London. She currently lives in London, where she teaches poetry at King’s College.

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (Feb 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017, a USA Today Top 10 Books of 2017, and an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Great Reads. Min Jin went to Yale College where she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time. She has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her fiction has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and has appeared most recently in One Story.