Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. He won an English scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following army service in WWII he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award; from that point on he would publish roughly a book a year. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

Keith Gessen is a Russian-born American novelist, translator, activist, and journalist. He co-founded n+1 magazine, based in Brooklyn, in 2004. His debut novel All the Sad Young Literary Men was published in 2008 by The Viking Press, and he has translated from Russian Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby with Anna Summers. In 2010 he edited and introduced Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, and in 2011 became involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement and co-edited the OCCUPY! Gazette. His journalistic writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, and New York magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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