Eva Björg Ægisdóttir is an Icelandic crime writer from Akranes, the setting for her Forbidden Iceland series. She holds a BA in Sociology and an MA in Globalisation from Trondheim, Norway. After returning to Iceland in 2015, Eva worked as a flight attendant to carve out writing time, completing her debut novel The Creak on the Stairs in nine months. The book won the Blackbird Award in 2018 and the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger in 2021. Published in over 20 languages, her atmospheric crime novels focus on psychological depth and small-town secrets. Eva has written seven books to date and continues to explore the darker sides of human nature.

Omar Shahid Hamid is an acclaimed Pakistani novelist who lives in Karachi. In addition to his writing career, he has served as a senior counter terrorism police officer who, in between writing books, has survived several attempts on his life, investigated the international murder of a journalist in Kenya, and had his offices blown up by the Taliban. His first novel, The Prisoner, was published in 2013 by Pan Macmillan India, and proved to be a huge critical and commercial success. It has also been translated into French, German and Urdu, and is being adapted for a screenplay. His second novel, The Spinner’s Tale (2015, Pan Macmillan), won the Italy reads Pakistan prize and the Karachi Literature Festival fiction prize and has also been translated into Italian and German. His third book The Party Worker (2017, Pan Macmillan) won the Karachi Literature Festival fiction prize, making Omar the only writer to have won in consecutive years. His fourth book, The Fix (2019, Pan Macmillan) explores the world of match fixing in women’s cricket. His fifth book, Betrayal (2021, Lighthouse Publishing) won the Karachi Adab Festival award in 2023. The Election is his sixth novel.