James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism.

Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. A brilliant student, he briefly attended the Christian Brothers-run O'Connell School before excelling at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances. He went on to attend University College Dublin.

In 1904, in his early twenties, Joyce emigrated to continental Europe with his partner (and later wife) Nora Barnacle. They lived in Trieste, Paris, and Zürich. Although most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe centres on Dublin and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses, he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

Edna Ann Proulx (; born August 22, 1935) is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.

She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005.

Sara Brita Stridsberg (born 29 August 1972 in Solna, Stockholm County) is a Swedish author and translator. Her first novel, Happy Sally was about Sally Bauer, who in 1939 had become the first Scandinavian woman to swim the English Channel.

In 2007, she was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for her novel Drömfakulteten (Valerie, or The Faculty of Dreams), which is her second novel and a fictitious story about Valerie Solanas, who wrote the SCUM manifesto, which Stridsberg has translated into Swedish.

Svenska Dagbladet called Stridsberg "one of our foremost nature poets" and considered her among the best in contemporary Swedish literature while noting that Stridsberg's novels are alway discomforting to read.

In 2016, Stridsberg was elected to the 13th chair on the Swedish Academy previously occupied by Gunnel Vallquist. She was inducted into the Academy on 20 December 2016. On 27 April 2018 she left the Academy, in solidarity with Sara Danius.