Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals - later filmed as The Durrells in Corfu - and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands.

Durrell's first major novel, The Black Book, was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin - and it was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in his new home in Southern France, where in 1974 he began The Avignon Quintet. When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history.

Alaa Al Aswany originally trained as a dentist and retains his own dental practice in Cairo. His novel The Yacoubian Building has sold over one million copies worldwide and was the bestselling novel in the Arab world for over five years. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and published in over one hundred countries. He speaks Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. Al Aswany has received many awards internationally, including the Bashrahil Award for the Arabic novel, the Kafavis Award from Greece, and the Grinzane Cavour Award from Italy, and was named by The Times as one of the fifty best authors to have been translated into English over the last fifty years. In 2016, he was appointed a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.